


And Why Not You?

by KeirMoonrock



Series: Walk On [2]
Category: The Beatles (Band)
Genre: Alcoholism, CW: Sigmund Freud, Drug Abuse, Dysfunctional Family, I swear this kid never sleeps, M/M, Movie References, Movies as a major plot point, Uno (the card game), criminal activity, past/referenced child neglect, teenage angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-02
Updated: 2021-01-29
Packaged: 2021-03-09 17:54:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 46,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27830359
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeirMoonrock/pseuds/KeirMoonrock
Summary: At all of nineteen years old, and with nothing to his name but a burglary charge and a festering addiction to adderall, Jason Starkey's pessimism makes Julian Lennon look like Winston Freaking Churchill in the midst of the Second World War.But it isn't like he's got no reason for it--without a degree, any skills, or if we're being honest, a single brain cell to spare, the kid can't do much else but laze around his house trying  avoid his two fathers: the alcoholic Ritchie and the incompetent George.Still, every dark cloud has a silver lining, every dark room has a silver screen, and if he doesn't blink, Jason just might catch them both.(The sequel to “Digging a Hole and Drinking Wine”)
Relationships: George Harrison/Ringo Starr, John Lennon/Yoko Ono, Linda McCartney/Paul McCartney, starrison - Relationship
Series: Walk On [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1991308
Comments: 22
Kudos: 13





	1. Doctor Starkey’s Simple Guide to Life, Love, Success, Clear Skin, Happiness, Inner Peace, This, That, and The Other Thing

**Author's Note:**

> Be advised that this is the second installment of my series "Walk On" the first having been the critically acclaimed* "Digging a Hole and Drinking Wine." You could /probably/ read this one just fine without the first, but the context might be nice.
> 
> I should also add that all warnings and disclaimers from the first installment still apply in this work, and though they may not be mentioned here, future parts will likely contain mentions of: Alcohol abuse, drug abuse, depression, thoughts of self-harm, suicidal thoughts, and past/referenced child abuse and neglect (including sexual).
> 
> I have been lucky enough that none of these issues have struck very close to home for myself or anyone I know, but I nonetheless will do everything in my power to portray them with a good bit of accuracy.
> 
> And with that, enjoy.
> 
> *By only CelesteFitzgerald and Rufusrant

Jason wasn’t sure what he was expecting when he picked up the phone.

He knew the industry-standard topics would come up—Tatia, Sarah, Lee and Dhani, Dad and Baba, work and the lack thereof… 

But at some point, the young man knew, the tone of the conversation would shift, Zak’s voice lowering, soft as butter and tense as a wire as he asked the one question his brother was dreading:

“So…” he teetered. “What’s this about you gettin’ arrested?”

Jason let out a long sigh, his eyes dragging over to the poster of The Police on the wall, as if praying to the gods of 1980s pop rock that he would simply materialize out of the room, leaving nothing but an unanswered question and a very confused Zak behind.

“So you’ve heard,” he muttered, glaring at the silent deities. 

Zak let out an uncertain laugh, one smothered as soon as it left his mouth.

“I did,” he said. “It was Dad who told me, though, so I’m not all that sure if he got everything right...”

“Oh God,” Jason spat, his face souring at just the idea of his father retelling the story. “What’d he say?”

Shifting around a bit wherever he was, Zak answered, “Told me you got caught tryin’ to steal a car radio by the bowling alley.”

“Mm-hmm.”

There was a frighteningly long pause as Jason waited for the second half of the story.

He knew for a fact that Zak would do everything in his power not to say it out loud, considering the nature of it all, but there was a part of Jason that wanted to hear the words leave his brother’s mouth.

Heaven and hell both knew he didn’t have the patience to listen to the man dance around the issue for an hour and a half. 

“And,” the older man finally staggered. “And you got caught with adderall on ye.”

There it was—it was now Jason’s turn to retell the story he had told twenty times over in the past two days, and of all people, he would have to tell it to Zak.

Thanks for nothing, Sting.

“Well,” Jason sighed, hoping to find some sort of silver lining. “What do you know? The old geezer actually got it right.”

“I guess so.”

Another pause.

And while Zak could have asked any number of questions, while he had a wide selection of  _ why _ s and  _ how _ s and  _ who _ s to speak of, the one that first left the Welshman’s lips was:

“At the bowling alley, of all places?”

Not expecting such a reaction, Jason couldn’t help but laugh, a low, mischievous cackle accompanied by a characteristic toss of the head.

“Hell yeah, man,” he joked. “Where else?”

But Zak didn’t seem to find it funny.

His voice was strained, struggling to make light of the situation as he sighed, “Yeah… I guess I should have seen that coming. But…”

Oh boy.

Jason dug his hand into his scalp.

Here came the meat of the conversation, to the dismay of their Baba and all vegetarians the world over.

“Where’d you get it?” Zak finally asked, slow and low as molasses. “The adderall, I mean.”

Jason shrugged.

“I don’t know. Wherever drugs and pills are sold.”

“Jay.”

The young man picked at the lint in his jacket as his cheeks began to warm.

“What do you want me to tell you?” he hissed, jaw snapping like a mad dog’s. “What, do you want some yourself?”

“Jay, come on,” Zak groaned. “I’m just tryin to make su—”

“I didn’t get it from you, you gobshite. Now can you untwist your knickers and move on with your life?”

He could almost see his brother’s disappointed frown from the other side of the phone, how his eyes ticked up at the corners out of both frustration and concern.

“Fine,” Zak sighed, though it was very clearly not fine. “I take it Dad and Baba are givin’ you hell?”

Jason scoffed.

“Like you wouldn’t believe. You’d think I ran over Dhani with a bus.”

“I’m amazed you’ve still got your phone, then,” Zak said tauntingly slow, as if to imply there had been some sort of shenanigan to retrieve the device.

The younger man shrugged. “But I lost the car keys. And if they catch me within twenty meters of a bus stop, I reckon I’ll be shot on sight. Not allowed to have anyone over, either.” 

“How l—”

“Plus,” Jason continued. “I’ve got to start in the shop on Monday. The old man tell you that much?”

“No, actually… but that inn’t so bad now, is it? Working at the shop? You’ll have me and Jude to keep you company.”

“Guess so,” the young man sighed. “If he doesn’t get sick of me, at least.”

“He hasn’t for the past… what is it now?”

“Beats me. But you’ve got a point there. If he ain’t dropped me yet, then I don’t think he ever will.”

“He’s not the type, I don’t think,” Zak said, nodding. 

He paused.

“But back to the workin’,” he resolved. “—That’s all you got off with?”

“Sure,” Jason mused. “If you forget about the constant nagging.”

“And the stern talking to?”

“That’s the one, Baba,” his brother joked. “I swear to God, it’s like I’m a tickin’ time bomb.”

“What do you mean by that?”

Jason struggled to get the words out, staring at the cool rain dripping down his window as his cheeks flamed.

“I don’t know,” he grunted, a rising pressure in his chest as the distance between his brain and mouth grew. “Everyone keeps lookin’ at me like I got blood on my hands, you know? Baba especially—he just won’t leave me alone.”

Zak let out a low hum.

“He’s probably worried about you,” he offered. “I know I would be.”

“Well, I don’t see no reason for it,” Jason snapped. “Doesn’t he have anything better to do?”

“You’re his son, though.”

“Yeah, and he got two more plus a daughter. What’s your point?”

Zak hesitated before sighing, “Jay—you’ve gotta think about this. You’re off doin’ drugs. I think he’s got a right to be a little concerned.”

“Ain’t none of his business.”

The older man drew in a frustratingly quick breath and released it with all the speed of a worm on the Silk Road, a slight hint of laughter in the sound, like he was at his wit’s end with his brother.

The sound only deepened the flush in Jason’s cheeks, pressure building in his ribcage like a snake was coiling itself around his lungs. 

His fingers glued themselves together, locking in place against each other hard enough to cramp his hand.

“What?” he spat. “You got somethin’ you wanna say, or—”

“Oh,” Zak grunted. “Don’t you bust your arse off actin’ tough in front of me. Come on, Jay, you sound like an idiot.”

“Least I can—”

“Cut it out, for Christ’s sake! You— you really think that you can just do whatever you’d like and it ain’t none of Baba’s business?”

Jason tried to think of something to say.

But Zak didn’t grant him the luxury, going on in a heartbeat, “Tell me, have you talked to him about it at all?”

“About.  _ What _ ?”

“You doin’ drugs—has he talked to you about it?”

“Talked,” Jason sighed, knowing full well it would never put out the fire in his lungs. “Or yelled?”

Zak drew in a deep breath, shifting his position wherever he was.

And it was there that the conversation seemed to die.

“I’m not gonna get anywhere with that,” Zak said. “Am I?”

“Not really.”

Jason took a moment to simply lay down and watch as the casket was lowered into the ground.

“Then…”

A dead, beaten horse jumped out from the grave.

“What happened with all that?” Zak asked, quiet. “Just—how often is it that you do it?”

Jason’s face scrunched in on itself.

“What the hell d’ye mean by that?”

“Like… I mean, you stole a car radio, so… You’ve got to be doin’ enough adderall that you’re runnin’ out of money to buy it.”

“Oh yeah,” the younger man lilted, eyes rolling harder than the Stones. “I’m just sittin’ down for lunch everyday with a whole plate full o’ pills—”

“ _ Jason _ ,” Zak pleaded. “Come on, this inn’t the kinda thing to joke about.”

His brother shook his head.

“Well, alright, Nancy Reagan—you wanna know so bad, that’s fine! I don’t give a damn… But I don’t gotta tell you.”

“Let me guess,” the older man sighed. “It ain’t none of my business.”

“No, Mrs. President. It’s not.”

Zak let out another sigh, if only to earn himself some sympathy.

“I don’t understand what’s so wrong with tryin’ to make sure you’re alright,” he said dryly. “I mean, you know I’m not a buzzkill—you wanna listen to some Pink Floyd and get stoned out of your mind on a Saturday night, that’s your own junk to figure out.

“But getting arrested ‘cos you were downin’ pills and tryin’ to steal shit… that’s another thing entirely.”

“Well it’s not like I was so loopy I just thought I’d break into a car!” Jason flamed. “Jesus H. Christ, you’re literally  _ on  _ ad—”

“I never said you were!” his brother said, quick as a hare. “Listen, I just need to know—is that something you do often?”

“The adderall?”

“Yeah—do you do it a lot?”

Jason shifted among his pillows and blankets (or the lack thereof) a frown on his face as he answered, “Shit… I mean it ain’t like I’m walkin’ everywhere high.”

“How often, though? If you had to say how many times in a week—”

“Zak,” Jason deadpanned. “Do you even know how many days are in a week?”

“Just answer the fucking question.”

“I don’t know, man—and you shouldn’t  _ need  _ to know either. Leave that between me and the statues in the living room.”

“For God’s sake, Jason! I’m n—”

“God _ s  _ plural!” The young man corrected. “Thirty million of ‘em and still goin’ strong.”

“I’m not trying to come down on you!” Zak snapped. “But for God’s sake— _ Gods’ sake _ , if you really wanna be such a smartass about it—I can’t just dance around it!”

Jason rolled his eyes.

“Like hell you can’t.”

“Jay…” the older man sighed. “Jay, Jay, Jay…”

“Oh my God, they told you my name and everything.”

Zak let out a pathetic laugh.

“I don’t—God… I guess you’re too stubborn to listen to me, huh?”

“Well,” Jason mumbled, toying with the zipper on his jacket. “I wouldn’t say stubborn… If anything,  _ you’re  _ the stubborn one. Oughtta lighten up sometime, you know? Let loose every once in awhile.”

“Believe me, I do. But there’s a big difference between letting loose playin’ with a baby and downing bottles of pills.”

If Jason was any more of a smart-aleck than he already was, he might just hae clarified that adderall was best enjoyed crushed and snorted  _ à la  _ cocaine.

But he could only imagine the panic that would send his brother into.

“I just…” Zak stammered. “I don’t wanna see you gettin’ hurt, you know? ‘Cos I’ve been there—with the drugs and the drinking and shit. And if you think that don’t come with consequences, you’re dead wrong.”

“Is my newfound criminal history not enough of a consequence for you?” Jason sighed, growing increasingly frustrated with the man.

“Well, of course that’s one of ‘em. But think about your relationships… I’m tellin’ you, man, you keep this up, and shit’s gonna hit the fan.”

“Yeah, I think I’m past that point, love.”

“Well,” Zak laughed. “The thing I’ve found is that when you think you can’t go any lower—you’re usually just lyin’ to yourself.”

Jason scoffed.

“I know, man. Take one look at Dad, and your point’s proved.”

There was a deafening silence on the other end.

Maybe it was meant to guilt trip Jason.

But at that, it spectacularly failed.

If Zak was really going to sit on his arse yelling at Jason and refusing to criticize their father, so the young man thought, then that made him no better than George.

God, if not for the overt differences in facial features, body type, personality, mannerisms, family history, genetic makeup, place of birth, date of birth, circumstances of birth, accent, speech pattern, and presence of mental illnesses and other neurological deficiencies—they were the same exact person.

Funny how that worked out.

“Jay,” Zak sighed. “I really need you to hear me when I tell you that you aren’t gonna get yourself in nothin’ but trouble if you try and solve everything with drugs.”

“Hear ye loud and clear, Major Tom.”

“And— and that goes for everything, really… drugs, alcohol, gamblin’, sex…”

“What in God’s name makes you think I’m havin’ any—”

“I could go on.”

“Well, yeah…” Jason guffawed. “I’m sure you  _ could _ , but—”

“My only point is that you can’t lean on somethin’ so hard that when it gets pulled out from under you, you fall on your arse. Lose your relationships, lose your job, lose your money… At some point you’ve just gotta put on your socks and deal with shit like an adult.”

Jason mulled over the words (which, like many things, only made half as much sense to him as they did to most people) and having nothing else to say, he mumbled, “Alright…”

Zak let out a breath he seemed to have been holding since the day of his actual birth.

“Do you want my advice?” he asked.

Amazing, Jason thought.

His brother seemed not to have heard anything he had said over the course of the past ten minutes. 

Of course, he went on, “Go find some people that care about you—that want to see you succeed. That’s… that’s the best way to get clean I’ve ever found.”

“Yeah,” Jason grunted. “Had a kid with your sob story and everything.”

Zak laughed. 

“And she’s a lovely kid, she is.”

He drew in a sharp breath.

“So there—that’s my two cents on the whole thing. Get yourself a new pair of socks and put ‘em on. Get some new friends. Get clean.”

“Doctor Starkey’s simple guide to life, love, success, clear skin, happiness, inner peace, this, that, and the other thing,” Jason muttered. “Just get some socks and go on your way…”

And as his brother let out a genuine chuckle, pleased with his life and everything he’d made of it, the young man’s face remained unchanged.

He was almost angry, really. 

Spiteful—that was the word.

See, Zak wasn’t very smart.

He knew that.

And Jason knew it, too.

It didn’t make him any worse of a person, of course. It was just the way he was—easily distracted, dyscalculic, and, by his own admission, just plain dumb.

He wasn’t booksmart—not because of any of his neurological deficiencies, as many brilliant minds have persevered in the presence of such adversity.

But he just wasn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer.

He didn’t know what would be good for Jason; he didn’t know what his brother’s intentions were in doing anything he had done or would go on to do. 

Still, if there was any subject that Zak Starkey could knowledgeably speak on—it was addiction.

He was, after all, the near alcoholic born to two meth addicts and adopted by (surprise, surprise) another alcoholic.

It was only logical that he would get the hang of how people sell their lives and livelihoods to some chemicals. 

And though he didn’t know it yet, that was what would come to scare Jason the most.

He wouldn’t admit it.

He wouldn’t dare think it.

And he wouldn’t ever let himself live it down.

But Jason Starkey, contrary to popular belief, did, in fact, have a problem—a problem involving a car radio, a mullet-toting psychologist, a game of Uno, an American surrogate child, and most importantly, a problem involving an orange, pill-shaped compound of dextroamphetamine and levoamphetamine.

The solution—if you’d like to call it that—wouldn’t come for a while.

But when it came, it would set forth its own problem, its own question to be answered.

As the screen before him would soon enough read:

_ Why am I me, and why not you? _


	2. Jude Freud

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry this took longer to post than usual (if you're at all familiar with my upload schedule, that is...) I've been having some newfangled mental health challenges (though I am taking steps to work through them--worry not) lately, and on top of that, I had to rewrite this whole scene. Trust me--you don't want to see what it used to be. But all that aside, please enjoy!

There was nothing inherently special about the workshop—in fact, it was the least interesting section of the shop to look at, with its pale tile floors and unremarkable wooden cabinets. 

There was a reason for that, of course. And that was simply that no customer ever stepped foot inside of it. 

It was the mysterious world behind the ‘employees only’ sign, the curiously off-limits place where instruments went in beat up, bruised up, dull, sharp, flat, and out of tune, then left as shiny-sweet as a newborn baby.

You could make the case that the repairs themselves were what lightened up the workshop, sure—and make no mistake, there was a lot of care put into those repairs—but you would have to have some pretty niche passions to say that instrument refurbishment was something so tear-wellingly beautiful.

If anything made the bland room a little more lively, then it was undoubtedly the people inside.

On this particular afternoon, there were only two of them—a wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, very alarmed Julian, and the source of his concern, a red-faced, loud-mouthed, very angry Jason.

The young man burst into the room shouting, a snarl on his face as he cussed out his father and slammed the door hard enough to knock the ‘employees only’ sign straight off.

After giving the door a proper kick, pretending it was Ritchie’s jeans that his foot dug into, and not plain wood, he heard the older man’s meek voice call out:

“Is… is something wrong?”

Jason’s chest heaved as he turned around, his face still contorted as his eyes met Jude’s.

Looking at the guy, his cheeks white enough to pair a cheese and cracker platter with an iced coffee, his joints so stiff they were beginning to violate the laws of physics, Jason couldn’t help but feel tempted to snap back with his usual venomous sarcasm.

But for God’s sake, he thought, Julian Lennon was more timid of a man then he let on; he was clearly terrified by the situation in front of him.

And though it may not have always seemed like it, Jason wasn’t  _ completely  _ heartless.

So, after a full minute of shaking his head and setting a new world record for heaviest breathing, he answered as kindly as he could.

“I swear to God I’m gonna get that fucker in his sleep…”

“Ritchie?” Julian asked, confused. 

The young man had to bite back from sarcastically implying he was planning to assassinate the queen of England.

“Who else?” he sighed, pressing his back against what little space of the wall was bare. “Everyone else here has at least got some sense.”

Jude hummed. “I thought you two might have been at it—the walls ain’t so thick, you know.”\

“I could care less.”

That shut the older man up pretty quickly, his cheeks still pale as he drew in a deep breath.

And though he would never admit it, Jason did feel a bit bad for having scared the lad.

So it was with a deep breath of his own that he took a seat near his friend turned coworker, and in a less aggressive voice, vented, “I guess I should have known better than to let him catch me.”

Jude’s eyebrows knit together, his head tilting as he looked up from his phone.

He obviously hadn’t been working, but Jason was going to leave that one between the older man and God. 

He had bigger things to worry about, he thought as he dug into his pocket.

“Catch you doing what, exactly?” Patrick asked, sounding unsure of his surroundings.

Jason didn’t need to answer with words.

The pill-stuffed bag he threw on the table gave all the clarity Jude could possibly need—and then some.

And for the first time in his whole life, Julian Lennon stopped squinting.

He stopped moving, too.

For a moment, he really was frozen, his face paralyzed in as polite an expression of  _ what the fuck have you just brought upon this cursed land  _ as he could manage.

If he wasn’t so frustrated with every single atom around him, Jason just might have laughed.

But instead he stayed silent, unimpressed as he watched his friend blink once.

And then twice.

Then thre—fou—or—pardon me—five times, his eyelashes fluttering like a little girl’s did holding a butterfly.

“Well,” Jude finally said (or really breathed,) “Now I’ve seen everything.”

Jason shook his head as he opened the bag.

“You ain’t never seen someone let loose on a fine Thursday afternoon?”

The older man drew back, cheeks flushed.

“I…” he hesitated. “Erm… no. I’ve definitely  _ seen  _ people doing…that.”

Jason couldn’t help but smirk.

There was square, and there was really square.

But Julian was on a whole other level.

“I just…” the man continued. “Well, I’ll tell you this much, I certainly wasn’t expecting to see you of all people doing it on the job. I mean…”

“Whatever your expectations are,” Jason responded, pulling three round, orange tablets from the bag. “They could always be lower—this  _ is  _ Starkey Music, you know.”

Jude shifted uncomfortably in his chair. 

“I suppose so,” he murmured. “But… don’t you think your dad’s gonna fire you for that?”

“To be fired,” Jason sighed. “I’m pretty sure you have to be making money. And what’s he care, anyways? Ain’t no different from him chuggin’ a bottle of vodka in his closet.”

Julian let out a high-pitched hum, like he wasn’t so sure about that.

“Maybe not… but he’s not workin’ with people all day. No one really sees him when he’s buzzed up.”

Jason paused, placing the pills on the table.

“Then I guess he makes up for it on the drive home,” he said, matter-of-fact. “If he wants to drink nine-to-five, then at six, he can bet his life on it.”

Julian’s eyebrows raised.

“Do you drive here?” 

“God, no—he makes  _ me  _ drive with  _ him _ .”

“Oh Lord…”

“Yeah, I know. It’s a wonder I’ve still got eleven fingers and twelve toes."

To this Jude couldn’t help but give the slightest hint of a (quite confused) smirk.

“Right…” he muttered. “But—do you ever think maybe you should just take the bus? You could tell him to, as w—”

Jason only had one response for that, a phrase stolen straight from their boss.

“You got bus money?” he asked.

That dispelled the notion pretty quick.

And from then on, Jason moved about in silence, Jude’s eyes on him as he dug into his pocket, stood up to better take hold of its contents, fiddled around as best he could in the chair, grabbed his wallet, opened it, stared at the picture of him and Zak inside, and pulled out his credit card.

It wasn’t until the young man made a move for the closest blunt object (not in short supply in the workshop) that Julian finally asked:

“What is that, anyways?”

“Hm?”

“I don’t mean to sound like a square or anything,” the older man clarified. “But I’d just like to know what in God’s name that is. I ain’t never seen any pills so… brightly colored.”

“Oh,” Jason snickered. “You didn’t know? This is how they make the sherbet candies these days.”

“Come on.”

“No,” the young man insisted. “It’s true—they’re changin’ up their image for the new generation.”

“Jay.”

“It’s the Age of the Information Superhighway, Judy! It’s the sweets of the future I’ve got here, and y—”

Julian was not in any sense of the word amused.

“Just tell me what it is,” he sighed. “You know I ain’t gonna call the cops on you or nothin’.”

“Oh,” Jason groaned. “You aren’t any fun.”

The older man didn’t respond to that.

Maybe he had heard it too many times to care any more.

“But it’s just a little bit of adderall.”

Julian cocked an eyebrow.

“Something tells me it’s not ‘cos you got ADHD.”

The younger man snickered.

“What gave it away?”

“Well, I might not have much of a brain in me head, but I think I’ve got the smarts enough to know that pills in a plastic zip bag aren’t usually the legal kind of pills.”

“Yeah,” Jason sighed, inspecting the tool in his hand. “You got that much right.”

Julian pouted as he watched his friend move across the workshop.

“You really think your dad’s gonna let you get away with that?” he asked.

The younger man shrugged.

“I mean… shit… he doesn’t even remember what he ate for breakfast this morning. Come six, I don’t think he’s gonna have a single memory of our little  _ quarrel _ .”

Julian bit his lip.

“Maybe not, but he could still tell the other one.”

“George?” Jason asked. 

“Yeah—he could tell him and then he can beat your arse for it.”

The young man scoffed.

“Well, you know what? He already has. And he can suck it.”

Shaking his head, he went on, “If he’s gonna be out here watchin’ my dad get pissed every night and he ain’t gonna say nothin’, then he hasn’t got any right to tear into me for anything.”

Julian squinted slightly more than usual.

“I swear to God,” Jason concluded, sitting back down at the table. “He’d let that gobshite get away with murder…”

Without any further banter, the young man readied the tool in his hand.

It would be heavy enough to do the job, he reasoned, if only he took care not to come down so hard against the pills that their powder filled the room like a smoke bomb.

Curling his fingers around the handle, he began to lift his arm.

And it was at that moment exactly, not a second sooner or later, that Jude Freud introduced himself.

“Is that really necessary?” Julian asked, his hand on his chin. 

Jason turned around, looking like the man had dropped a dead rat on his front stoop.

And shifting a second time in his chair, Jude elaborated, “For all the trouble it’ll cause—you bein’ high on the job, you gettin’ in a car high with your drunk dad—do you really think it’ll be worth it to do that? It seems to me like it’d just cause more problems than solutions.”

The younger man couldn’t seem to look his friend in the eyes as he mulled over the question.

“Shit,” he said after an elongated pause. “I don’t know. But I’ll tell you what, the closer I can get to bein’ out of this place, the better. I’m not here because I want to be, you know.”

“So I’ve heard,” Jude sighed. 

“Yeah, I guess I’m the car radio guy now.”

“Was it just the radio?” the older man asked, confused. “Stella McCartney told me it was the whole thing.”

Jason crossed his arms on the table, setting the tool down.

“That’s your first mistake,” he told the man. “Listenin’ to Stella McCartney. Every word out her mouth is some kinda gossip.”

Julian hummed, low and long.

“I suppose so.”

“But damn,” Jason shook his head. “Word’s really gotten around, hasn’t it?”

Jude’s eyebrows raised.

“Oh yeah—I heard it from Zak, Paul and Stella in one day alone. It’s the talk of our little… what would you call us exactly? The lot of us that hang around at Paul and Linda’s on Friday nights? Me, you, your siblings, the McCartneys… Sean?”   
“The Royal Society of People With Nothing Better To Do,” Jason joked. 

Julian nodded, a stunted and painfully unnatural laugh escaping his lips.

“That sounds about right. Yeah—the whole Society knows about you now.”

“Teenyboppers included?”

“Could be,” the older man teetered. “But I’d have to ask Sean.”

“Don’t bother,” Jason said, rolling his eyes. “Last thing I need is for him to run his mouth off to Dhani. I’m not all that sure he knows yet.”

“Understood. But hey—I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you. We’ve all been Stella’s gossip at some point.”

“Is that so?” Jason asked, turning at last to his friend as his hand returned to the tool on the table.

“Oh, for sure. Don’t you remember when I beat that kid’s head in with a percussion mallet?”

Something halfway between a gape and a grin formed on the younger man’s face.

“You  _ what _ ?!” he asked, raising his voice.

“Oh my God,” Julian said, taken aback. “You don’t remember?”

“No!”

“Seriously? I didn’t think anyone would ever let me live it down…”

“Storytime, Jude.” Jason commanded, setting the tool down as quickly as he had picked it up.

The corner of the older man’s mouth perked up.

“You’d really like to hear it?”

“You had me at  _ beat his head in with a percussion mallet _ .”

Julian smiled.

“Well, if you insist…”

As he drew a breath in, preparing to begin the terrible tale, Jason shifted in his seat, elbows on the table and spine hunched like Quasimodo’s as he studied the older man’s eyes.

“The year,” Julian began. “Was 2013—I was fifteen years old. And in all my long-haired pseudo-punk glory, as I’m sure you can imagine—”

“Oh, I remember.”

“Thought you would. But anyways—school had just started back up again a few months earlier, which meant that summer had just ended.”

“Naturally,” Jason agreed.

Jude turned to him with raised eyebrows, telling his story in the only way he knew how—through rhetorical questions—as he asked, “But what I had been up to that summer, you may be wondering? Well, I tell you what, I hadn’t liked it a single bit—I had spent near all of July in New York with my dad.”

Jason grinned like a sly weasel.

“I’m sure you had a ball,” he said, overexaggerating his words and movements.

Julian sighed.

“In all honesty—it was fine. But what can I say? I was fifteen and full of teenage angst, not to mention daddy issues.”

“Try havin’ two of ‘em. Twice the daddy issues, there.”

The older man considered this.

“Huh,” he said after a while, gazing out towards the beaten-up door. “Never thought of it like that… but yeah. I had had a pretty shitty summer. 

“And like the  _ insufferable bastard  _ I was,” he continued, lowering his eyelids and raising his eyebrows in a comically pompous voice, as though he was some kind of empirical general, “And still am, if you ask me, I dealt with it by declarin’ the whole human race kaput.”

“Pessimism,” Jason sighed. “Now that’s the Jude I know and love.”

Right in the midst of the story, Julian turned around, disgusted.

“You don’t love me,” he said.

The younger man shrugged.

“I love ye as a member of the People With Nothing Better to Do.”

But Jude only shook his head.

“And I’d love if you stopped interrupting me,” he sighed. “You were the one that asked to hear this story, you know.”

“Fine, fine,” Jason said, raising his hands in surrender. “Carry on.”

Julian took another breath in.

“There I was,” he went on. “Out there thinkin’ everyone on the freakin’ planet was out to blow it up—still do sometimes, but now I’m less of an insufferable fuck abou it—and I was in my band class.

“I was in the back; If I remember right, then I was on the xylophone back in those days. And from the very corner of the room, bein’ the one of, like, three guys standing, I got a pretty good view of everyone else in the room.

“And they were all fine people,” he shrugged. “Not the top of the barrel, but not the bottom, either.”

Looking into Jason’s eyes then, he added, “Apart from one guy—and his name was Toby Kingston.”

Hearing that, the younger man couldn’t help but think to himself that if he was named Toby, he would probably be bottom-of-the-barrel, too.

Jude let out a sharp sigh.

“When I tell you,” he breathed. “That this guy was the gobshite to end all gobshites—I mean it. He was the type to go around askin’ for cigs, then call you gay for not givin’ him any, then call you emo even though you were listenin’ to The Clash and not… fuckin’... Fall Out Boy.”

Jason laughed, and for a very brief moment, Julian laughed with him, a grin on his face as he stammered out a single, “Ha.”

Shaking his head, he went on, “Really, though. After all that, he would just steal your cigs and run away laughin’. Absolute gobshite, that Kingston kid.

“So I’m standing there, in band, and I’m playin’ the xylophone, and I’m lookin’ at him, and all I can think about is how much I hate him. 

“There weren’t many people I  _ hated  _ in school, of course—though there weren’t many people I  _ liked  _ either—but Toby… he was the exception.

“The class finishes up, and we’re all packin’ our shit for lunch, and I’m still thinkin’ about it. So d’ye know what I did?”

“What?” Jason asked, eager as a kid in a candy store. 

Julian leaned back in his chair. 

“I caught his eye, and by God, I threw my mallet straight at his forehead.”

Jason cackled.

“It’s true,” Jude reminded. “I threw it at him, and it hit him right between the eyes. He cussed me out, of course, and the whole damn class was lookin’ at me like I came from outer space, but I didn’t give a shit. Hell, I had another mallet in my hand.”

“You didn’t—”

“Sure did. I marched right up to him, madman I was, and I pushed him on the ground and started bangin’ it against his head.”

“Toby Kingston—the human xylophone.”

“That’s it,” Julian sighed, halfway between amused and disappointed. “Kicked him in the balls, too. And the strange thing about it all was that I didn’t have any idea what was going on. Didn’t have the slightest clue why I was beatin’ on him, I just knew I was doing it and that was that.

“So long story short, I got kicked out the class.”

“No kidding.”

“And they took me down to the front office and all, called my mum and his mum and handed me over to the counselors ‘cos they thought I was psycho—good call on their part, for the record.

“And when I tell you that my mum was mad,” he said, lowering his voice. “I mean she was  _ mad _ . It was the most trouble I’ve ever been in, no competition whatsoever.

“So I got my whole big long lecture, got suspended, had to go to that weasel’s house and apologize over tea… and one thing led to another, and my mum told Paul, who told his kids, who probably told you. Wouldn’t be surprised if it made its way to New York, even… but yeah. It was the crime of the century, if you catch my drift.”

“Until I showed up,” Jason groaned. “Now what? Have I just got to wait for… I don’t know, for Mary McCartney to get pregnant?”

“I hope not,” Julian said, eyes bulging. “Just take it from someone who’s been there, Jay—it’ll die down after a while.”

“Yeah, once  _ I  _ die with it.”

“Aw, come on. You’ll live.”

Jason rolled his eyes.

“I wish that I wouldn’t.”

“And I wish you all the best,” Jude countered. “Even if you do die, I’ll smoke a joint over your grave for ye.”

The young man couldn’t help but smile at the thought of a stoned Julian Lennon walking aimlessly around a graveyard.

And for a short while, that was what engrossed the two—their thoughts.

Each one found himself in a separate world, enveloped in the folds of their minds as they reflected on the past, present, and future.

Until—like always—Julian opened his mouth.

“Took a while,” he said, eyes slightly squinted. “But after talkin’ to my mum and Paul and everyone else under the sun, I think I finally figured out why I did it.”

“‘Cos his name was fuckin’ Toby?” Jason offered. “I mean… Jesus Christ, that’s a hamster’s name!”

“No,” his friend sighed. “Lookin’ back on the whole thing, I think I was just… really tense from that summer. 

“I mean, it was a whole thing, you know? I was old enough to start gettin’ real mad at my dad for dropping off the face of the Earth when I was a kid, I was mad at Yoko for draggin’ him to the other side of it, I was mad at Sean just for… I don’t know, being born?”

“Yeah, I can see why.”

“Come on, now. He ain’t all that bad.”

“Maybe not, but he hated me first. And all I ever did was try and mess with him and James every single time they came over—now I’m the devil incarnate.”

“So the feeling’s mutual, then?”

“Mutual as mutual gets,” Jason sighed, smiling at the memories of his many shenanigans.

Julian hummed.

“I see. But… yeah. I was just mad at everyone. And more than anyone, I think I was mad at myself. It’s a rough life, you know, growin’ up without a dad. Really messes up a lad.

“So I guess I was just angry I had to go through it all—ever since I was a kid, I just seemed to have the worst luck in the whole world. 

“Didn’t make any sense to me,” he shrugged. “Why the universe had set my life on hard mode. Still doesn’t, really. But more so back then.

“So to simplify it,” Jude sighed at last. “I think what happened was that I just had all this anger in me—mostly at my dad, you know—and seein’ some arse like Toby Kingston running around and pullin’ the same shit I’d expect from the old man, I just sort of… took it out on him.”

Jason turned his head very slowly.

“You mean to tell me that you kicked a kid in the balls ‘cos what you really wanted was to kick yer dad in the balls?”

A bashful smile broke the stoicism of Julian’s face.

“If that’s how you want to put it,” he chuckled. “Then yeah—that’s what it was.”

Jason nodded his head, still taking in the whole thing.

“Now that,” he said after a moment. “Is some serious Freudian shit.”

“I guess it is,” Jude shrugged. “The tamer side of him, anyways.”

“How’d you even come up with that?”

“Simple,” he said, matter-of-fact. “I just pulled too many all-nighters.”

Jason’s eyebrows raised.

“Is that what you’re up doin’ at three in the morning? Really?”

“Some nights.”

“For God’s sake, all I do is eat shredded cheese!”

Julian smiled.

“Well, you’ll be pleased to know that nine times out of ten, I do the same.”

“But on the tenth night—”

“Introspection all the way,” the older man sighed, standing up from his chair as he put his phone back in his pocket. “Takin’ a look at your own thoughts and shit—More people ought to do it every now and then if you ask me.”

Jason’s face contorted.

“Oh my God,” he gasped. “He’s trying to rope me into some meditation cult…”

Jude shook his head.

“Only cult I’m talkin’ about is the Cult of Wasted Psychology Majors,” he said. “But you’re more than welcome to join us, if you’d like.”

“What gave you the idea I’m going to uni?” Jason scoffed. “I don’t got nothin’ but shit for brains.”

“And I don’t have any more time to spend sittin’ here and telling you about my juvenile misadventures—it’s Vasily’s turn in here. So unless you want to ask a six-foot Ukranian what he used to…”

Jason shook a pointed finger in the direction of the door.

“You know what?” he asked, voice cracking as he recollected his pills, seemingly unnoticing that they weren’t in his nostrils. “I think I just might leave.”

“Good choice,” Julian sighed.

The younger man felt his friend’s eyes on him as he stuffed the bag back in his jacket, but he didn’t think anything of it—at least not yet.

And while the two made their way back into the main part of the shop—the one with guitars on the walls and the smell of polished wood in the air—it became very clear that the conversation had died down.

“You think he’s forgotten about me?” Jason asked, looking around to see who was around them.

Jude pouted.

“Who? Ritchie?”

“Yeah—you think he forgot I was out there—”

The older man cut him off with a high-pitched hum.

“I think I’ll leave that for you to find out,” he said. “Once you guys get home.”

“Damn… Hangin’ me dry like that…”

“Only doing what I’ve got to,” Julian sighed. “You know, I’ve got a girl in for lessons in ten minutes, and I ain’t even set anything up yet.”

Jason shoved his hands in his pockets.

“In that case,” he said, rolling his neck so that he was blinded by the fluorescent lights above him. “You have fun.”

“I’ll have as much as I can… and you too, by the way.”

He gave a half of a smile then, and finally added, “I’m glad to have kept ye from lettin’ loose.”

The young man’s head snapped back so fast he thought he would break something.

“Aw, what?” he asked. “You were doin’ that on purpose?”

Julian squinted, pleased with himself as he said, “Word of advice—never make friends with a psych major. If they know how to fix your head, then they’ll know how to mess with it, too.”

Jason could only let his jaw slack as he watched the man move up the stairs, continuing, “And another one! Introspection! That shit’s important!”

The young man shook his head.

“Lord, Jude… I ain’t stoned enough for  _ that _ .”

“One day, then,” Julian laughed. “One day I’ll rope you into the cult.”

The door upstairs shut before Jason could form any sort of response.

But he knew well enough what he thought.

He wasn’t smart.

He wasn’t much of anything, really.

But he  _ definitely  _ wasn’t any type of Freud—Sigmund  _ or  _ Jude.

That’s what he thought at the time.

But the mind is a very fickle thing.    



	3. Nothing But Eyes and Ears

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this series (and especially the first installment) really seems to be taking off lately--at least by the standards of someone who writes about Kyoko Cox and Jason Starkey--and I have to say that I'm not sure why?? I don't know if one of you recommended it to everyone you know and their mother, but I'll tell you what, I'm stoked! To all the new kids on the block, welcome and enjoy your stay! I hope I can live up to your expectations.
> 
> ...
> 
> And subvert them from time to time, of course.

The thing about adderall—the  _ defining  _ feature of it, actually—was that when broken down by the body, it greatly improved one’s concentration. 

This had obvious benefits for its target demographic, considering they were afflicted by an illness that literally began with  _ attention-deficit _ .

But its effects didn’t discriminate between those with ADD or ADHD and those without, which meant that when ingested by a typically-minded person, especially in larger-than-recommended amounts, and  _ especially  _ when snorted through the nostrils, it did some interesting things to a person.

It was clear from the very start to Jason why so many uni students used it—if he had the brains to go to uni, then he would do it, too. But though the productivity was nice for a change, it wasn’t his original reason for using the drug.

_ That  _ had been a mistake, really. It was a cheap party thrill on Halloween one night, suggested and encouraged by his less-than-stellar then-girlfriend.

And by God, had he been the life of the party that night.

It was a buzz for the boy, something that upped the shockingly low stores of energy he usually made do with.

It made him wittier, more clever, and above all, more fun to be around—even She Whose Name Must Never Be Spoken (Though It Was Michelle, If You Were Wondering) had made note that Jason was a much more interesting person drugged up then sober.

So, if you really wanted to think about it, maybe you could blame her for his abuse, arrest, and borderline-but-the-line-was-crossed-a-long-time-ago addiction.

But Jason didn’t like to think very much.

Not about anything that wasn’t directly around him, anyways.

And that evening, what was around him was… well, a lot of things.

He was busy on his phone (much to his Baba’s disdain) at the top of the steps, having felt the inexplicable need to move out of his bedroom and perch himself up above the foyer. 

And the world inside the screen was certainly active—thriving, debatable, but active? Absolutely.

He was preoccupied working through two group chats at once, replying as at even a pace he could to such thought-provoking discussions as who had a hot cousin to hook someone up with, and whether a straw had one hole or two.

Riveting stuff, really. 

And outside of the screen—in his house, that is—things were exactly as they usually were.

Lee was blasting Siouxsie Sioux in her room and trying to decide three days in advance what she would wear to one of her friend’s birthday parties, Ritchie was downstairs nursing a beer (or two or six) and George was resting in his bed with his right ankle against his left knee, a half of a smile on his face as he fielded questions and scenarios from Dhani, curled up comfortably next to his father as he wound down for the night.

Jason was able to recognize all of this—it really was amazing how much of a multitasker he was when he was high.

He had his eyes on two separate conversations, for heaven’s sake, and his ears on a whole other one! And somehow, he still understood all of it.

It really was strange stuff, he thought to himself, that adderall…

Anyhow, George and Dhani’s evening conversations always followed the same pattern. It was a nightly thing, just the same as Ritchie getting drunk and watching the news.

Every now and then, Dhani would look up and ask, “Baba?”

And his Baba would follow suit, his eyes glued to whatever book he was reading at the time as he hummed in acknowledgement.

From there, the boy would ask his question—about space, cars, animals, God, right and wrong, or anything else that was on his mind. 

At that point, George would let out a sigh, set his book down, and explain the answer.

When he was done, he would keep quiet for a couple of seconds, then tilt his head at his son and ask, “Is that a good answer?”

To which Dhani would invariably nod and hum.

His father would then pat his head, and with a sigh, return to his book.

Until Dhani asked him another question.

It was simple, honestly—but it was a nice way to wind down in the evenings. 

Of course, while they were busy winding down, Jason was busy winding himself up like a music box on steroids—or stimulants.

He would stay up all night talking to people, wouldn’t eat anything until after the sun had come up, and would still be wide awake by the time his father came home drunk as a dog. 

That was the life he liked to live (or at least, it was the life he liked to live before he was sent to toil nine-to-five at Starkey Music and Reeducation Camp) sleeping until he had to eat dinner, and then staying up all night buzzed on his drug of choice.

At least he was still living something close to it, he thought to himself.

On the other side of the door to the master bedroom, he heard his brother take a deep breath.

It made his ears perk, made his eyes snap up like an eagle’s. 

That sound was new.

That sound didn’t belong in Dhani’s series of questions and answers.

Jason zeroed in on it, curious as to what could have caused such a sigh.

“Is everything alright?” George asked the boy, his voice softer than usual.

His son didn’t answer him at first.

And that was when Jason found himself frozen; he couldn’t tear his eyes away from the sight he couldn’t see, too plagued with curiosity and too poisoned with adderall.

“Dhani, love?” George repeated. “Are you doing alright?”

It took Dhani a moment to answer, “Yeah…”

The man on the stairs could hear his father’s body weight shift around on the mattress—he was trying to get a better look at the boy.

“What’s on your mind?” he prodded.

Only silence rang out.

But Jason could be absolutely sure of how his brother responded, hearing George go on, “You don’t know?”

“‘S not that,” Dhani lisped. 

“Then what is it?”

The boy was quiet for a minute.

Two minutes.

Maybe even three.

Jason couldn’t do much else but blink as they passed, unable to notice his phone vibrating in his hand.

To him, there wasn’t anything else but the door and the two behind it on the bed—no phone, no hunger, no straws with an arguable number of holes.

There was only George, Dhani, and the sharp sigh that spilled out of the latter’s mouth as he asked, “Baba?”

“Mm-hmm?” his father replied, more concerned than usual.

“Is…” he stammered. “Why are we…”

He paused.

“Are we normal?” he finally asked. “Are we a normal family?”

Jason’s face went numb.

The answer was crystal clear to him—a resounding, echoing,  _ deafening  _ no. 

Normal families didn’t disperse like oil and water the second they were given permission to do so.

Normal people’s dads didn’t drink six-packs of beer in one sitting.

Normal people’s dads didn’t scream at each other until they were blue in the face.

And normal kids didn’t fall asleep to the sound of plates crashing to the floor. 

If George was going to sit there, Jason thought, and lie to that boy…

“Well,” the old man said after a long pause. “We’re a little different then some other families, and we might not all look alike, but if you ask me, then that doesn’t make us any better or worse than any other family.”

“But are we normal?” Dhani repeated. 

George hesitated.

“Define normal.”

Jason felt about ready to smash his head through the door  _ Shining  _ style.

There was no way that unibrowed bastard was asking a seven year-old who grew up in a house that stunk to the high heavens like booze and cigarette smoke what it meant to be normal.

The young man could practically see his brother’s scrunched face as he answered, “I don’t know… have… have we got a family like everybody else’s? Or are we different?”

“Different how?”

Different, Jason thought, having completely forgotten about his group chats. Wasn’t that a nice word for dysfunctional?

Dhani was slow to speak as he said, “Like… I don’t know. We’re just different, aren’t we? Other people don’t have families like ours.”

George sighed.

“Maybe some people have a mum and a dad and a dog,” he explained. “But you’ve got two dads—and that’s something unique. It’s not any better or worse than havin’ a mum, if you ask m—”

“That’s not what I mean,” Dhani interrupted. “I mean… well… I guess that is pretty odd, but…”

He stammered for a minute before he could finally get the words out.

“We’re different,” he said. “Something’s different about us, and—and it’s not that we’ve got two dads, and everyone else has just got the one… and…”

If he was standing upright, then this is exactly the moment Dhani would have stomped his foot on the ground, frustrated with himself.

Jason almost wished he could shout the words out for him.

“I don’t know,” the boy whined, voice exaggerated to sound as though he was on the verge of his untimely death. “Just tell me what’s wrong with us!”

Hearing that, Jason couldn’t help but feel his heart split in two.

He wanted to grab that beanpole of a boy by the hair and scream at him that their Dad was a no-good drunk.

He wanted to stow his blasted tiny body away in a gym bag and make a run for it, just the two of them with nothing to lose and a whole world to gain.

He wanted to pull him up from his roots in the same way he and Zak and Lee all were, to hand him over to someone who would smile at his drawings and tell him the truth about the car wreck he called a home.

But all Jason could do at the top of the steps was dig his fingers into the carpet, admiring how the fibers clung to his powder-caked nails. 

That, and use his ears and eyes.

“Hey, hey, hey,” George hushed. “Hey, lift your head up, love—come ‘ere…”

There was some more shifting on top of the bed.

“Listen to me, we aren’t any worse than anyone else, you hear? Not even if it’s me and your Dad watchin’ over you, not even if Zak and Lee and Jason are adopted, not even if you’re my kid… there ain’t a single thing wrong with any of that.”

“No,” Dhani insisted, growing increasingly distressed. “No, Baba, we’re different!”

George shook his head, a hum buzzing from his lips as he said, “We’re not any different then anyone else, love. We’re a family just the same as James’ and Sean’s, and—”

“Nuh- _ uh _ !”

“Come on, now. All we are is a bunch of people that love each other, and that’s what a normal family is.”

It was at that point that the boy finally snapped.

“Well—well then why did Jason get arrested?” he cried. “Normal people’s brothers don’t go to jail!”

Jason’s eyes grew wide.

Just when he thought that poor kid couldn’t cut him any deeper…

George was quick to hush his son.

“Dhani,” he scolded. “Cut that out! Come on—how do you think he would feel if he heard you say that?”

Oh, the irony, Jason thought.

“‘S true!” Dhani protested. “Jason went to jail, and—and he stole somethin’... Baba, normal people’s brothers don’t steal things!”

“Dhani Starkey,” George repeated, his voice lowered to signify his discontent. “That’s enough of that. Jason’s done some bad things, but he ain’t any less normal than you or Lee or anyone else. Do you understand that?”

The young man on the stairs could see his brother’s pout through the door.

“Do you understand that, Dhani?” 

The answer came begrudgingly, a word squeezed out from the spaces between loose teeth, spoken in that particular grumble only children could manage.

“Yes.”

“Very good,” George nodded. “Now if you’ve got a question for me, I want you to ask it respectfully. Can you do that?”

There was no reply—no audible one, anyways.

And then the old man loosened his grip on the conversation, sighing, “Sure you can, love. Now hit me up with it.”

A pause.

“I don’t wanna…”

“Not at all?”

“Not at all.”

“Not even a little bit?” George prodded. “You haven’t even got a half a question for me?”

“If I ask it,” the boy mumbled, voice cold as stone. “You’re just gonna yell at me.”

The old man let out a long sigh.

“I don’t have any reason to yell at you if you’re respectful about it, love. And I got a lot of faith you can do that.”

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.”

“Can’t.”

“Can.”

“Can’t,” Dhani whined.

“Can,” George sighed.

“Can’t.”

“Can’t."

“Can—hey!"

There came a laugh from beyond the door, a snicker of sorts from a well-meaning old man.

“ _ Baba _ !” Dhani groaned. “That isn’t  _ fair _ !”

“Aw, cheer up, love,” he cooed. “Come on—you were askin’ about our family?”

A shift on the bed signified that the boy had turned his back on his father.

“I’m not talkin’ to you.”

“Very well, then,” George sighed. “But I’m still talkin’ to you.”

“No you’re not.”

“And how do you plan on stopping me, exactly?”

It took a minute for Dhani to come up with his solution.

“I’m gonna strap you on a rocket to the moon!” he resolved. “And—and you’re gonna be all the way up there, so then you can’t talk to me at all!”

George hummed.

“Then I suppose I’ll just have to bring a big microphone with me.”

“Wha— _ Baba _ , that isn’t fair!”

The old man cupped his hands around his mouth in simulation of the scene. “Earth to Dhani,” he called. “Er—I suppose it would be  _ moon  _ to Dhani...”

Hearing that, the boy couldn’t help but laugh, shifting his weight a second time on the mattress in defiance of his earlier declaration.

“That’s it,” George sighed. “You come and join me up here—it’s nice and cool.”

“This isn’t the moon, Baba.”

“Maybe not, but we can always pretend.”

Jason squinted outside the room.

George pretended a lot of things.

“Now,” the old man huffed. “What is it that makes our family so much different from everyone else’s? Hm? What do you think a normal family looks like?”

“Well… I don’t know.”

The boy faltered, and in that moment, Jason wanted nothing more than to smack him upside the head, if only to try and knock some sense into him.

“Not ours. That’s for sure.”

“Have your friends got normal families?”

Dhani hummed, a soft buzzing squeezing out of his lips before he answered, “James does.”

“Why not Sean?”

“Sean’s parents scare me,” the boy sighed. “But he’s pretty nice.”

George couldn’t keep from laughing.

“Oh,” he grinned. “They scare me, too… but what makes their families so much more normal than ours?”

Jason lifted his eyebrows a bit, waiting for the beanpole’s roundabout way of talking to come full circle. 

His mind and ears were open, laser-focused on any hint of an answer. 

All he wanted was to find out whether or not Dhani had finally picked up on the state of their household.

But more importantly, he wanted to find out how George responded.

If it was Jason, Lee, or Zak who mentioned that Ritchie had crossed the line a long time ago, that the Starkey family was falling apart at the edges, and that the man had no choice left but to take his brain, pack his things, grab Dhani by the wrist, and leave—then the response was always the same.

George would hush, scold, mute, and lie his arse off if it was any of the other kids that told him to get a grip.

But Dhani was a special case.

He was the baby of the family, and not just that—he was  _ George’s  _ baby. 

The other three siblings had been told time and time again that there was to be no distinction between who in the household was related and who wasn’t—and for the most part, there wasn’t any. 

But there was no denying that George had a particular sort of affection for Dhani.

He wasn’t necessarily better or worse than any of the others—just different.

But he was different in more ways than one.

And the second most important, in that scenario, was that Dhani was not as oblivious to his surroundings as George thought he was.

They said what goes around comes around, Jason thought to himself. 

And if George was going to dish out faux-ignorance the way he did, then Dhani was bound to pick up on it.

Jason held his breath, waiting on the boy’s answer.

Radio silence.

Until…

“Other than havin’ a mum, and other than havin’ birth siblings,” Dhani finally reasoned, slow so as not to obstruct his own thinking. “They don’t fight each other like us.”

He had figured it out, Jason thought. And it was good that he had.

But it wasn’t the sort of thing that was easily forgotten.

Dhani could never go back to a time when he saw his family as just like everyone else’s.

It was a bit of a pity, a bit of a shame, if you will.

And Jason did feel a bit bad.

But more than anything, it was true.

“Like…” the boy went on. “They really seem to like each other.”

“We like each other,” George rushed. “You like me, don’t you?”

“I do,” Dhani said, unsure of himself. “But I haven’t ever heard Uncle Paul and Aunt Linda fight.”

“Believe me, love—they do. They just wouldn’t have any reason to do it while there are guests over.”

A pause.

“So then why have you and Dad got one?”

Now  _ that _ , Jason thought, was clever.

It was true that Paul and Linda had never gotten into any plate-smashing, word-slurring argument while any of the Starkey children were over—though, having been around them for so long, Jason  _ had  _ witnessed them get on each other’s nerves.

If not for any other reason, this was because they were the embodiment of the simplest concept George and Ritchie had yet to grasp—twenty-first century British etiquette.

Or, as Jason liked to think of it, the common sense that kept 99.7% of spouses from tearing each other apart in front of their children, friends, and the friends of their children.

There were more instances than the young man cared to count in which someone had invited their friends over (especially to stay the night) and by the end of the evening, the group had been forced to retreat to an isolated corner of the second floor—far away from the incessant shouting, pushing, and bickering taking place downstairs.

Sean and James were no exception to this phenomenon, nor were any of Dhani’s other friends.

Point being: there was a reason Dhani didn’t like to hold sleepovers.

And if George hadn’t have seen that one coming, Jason thought, then he was as good as blind.

“What’s your reason, then?” the boy repeated. “If Uncle Paul and Aunt Linda don’t ever fight while any of us kids over, just ‘cos they haven’t got a reason to, then what’s yours?”

There was an unbearably tense air of near-silence as George stumbled over his words.

Jason reveled in it.

“Well…” the old man finally said, lips pulled thin and taught. “The thing about that is that your father has a tendency to…  _ overreact _ .”

“I don’t get it.”

A staggered sigh found its way out of George.

“He—You know, Dhani, some people are quite short-tempered, and… and Dad is one of those people. He’s quick to anger.”

He swallowed.

“He doesn’t think much of what’s around him when he’s angry… or who.”

“So that’s it,” the boy rationalized. “That’s what’s different.”

The words fell out of the old man’s mouth like air deflating from a balloon.

“You could say that.”

In the brief silence that arose right about then, all Jason could think was that George had to tell him why.

It was a nagging voice in his head, a claw that picked at his brain and rubbed the skin on his cheeks until they were red and raw.

Tell him, he thought.

For God’s sake, just tell him.

But George never said a word.

That was the thing about him—he never spoke unless he had to.

And even when he did have to, he still didn’t.

Pathetic.

Dhani shifted around on the mattress again as he added, “That’s what’s different with him, anyways.”

George’s voice grew softer.

“Is there something different about you?”

This question was met with a hum, a peculiar, high-pitched one, at that, fitting for a seven year-old who asked questions for fun.

“I’m not all that sure,” Dhani said. “I don’t really think so.”

“What about the rest of us, then? What makes us any different from Sean or James’s families?”

Jason had an answer for that already, sitting on the steps.

The thing that was different about himself, George, Lee, and Zak, was that they were looking at the situation they were in with four separate pairs of eyes.

Jason saw everything Ritchie did, and all of its effects perfectly, even when he didn’t want to.

Lee had her eyes closed so as not to see anything.

Zak distracted himself by staring at Sarah.

And George—well, he was just a conman pretending to be blind.

But Dhani was too little to see it all around him. All he saw were lights and colors, just barely taking form as he asked his questions.

So his older brother had it all figured out, sitting on the steps—so much so that he wondered why Dhani never came to ask  _ him  _ anything.

He could give him the answer to every question he had.

And while he was at it, he could answer George’s questions to Dhani for him.

In his own head, after all, Jason knew his brother better than either of his fathers ever would. It was just harder to get to know someone when they were scared of making one wrong move around you.

Put plainly: Jason’s confidence that he could predict everything the boy would say was through the roof.

Imagine his surprise when Dhani said this:

“Jason. That’s what’s different. I guess he’s got the same problem as you and Dad.”

The young man felt like the universe had knocked him on his arse.

And hey, for all the universe cared, it might as well have.

But disoriented as he was with the answer, he couldn’t help but hear it explained, and so he listened very carefully as his brother elaborated, “He’s got a small temper, too, hasn’t he?

“A short temper, love.”

“Yeah—that. But he fights Dad just the same as you. And when he does it, it’s even worse.”

“Oh,” George sighed. “They do fight, don’t they? I’ll tell you what, it’s amazing that Jason still picked it up from him without bein’ his birth kid—they’re both real hotheaded.”

“Is that why he got arrested?” Dhani asked after a pause. “Because he’s got a hot head?”

Jason’s eyes widened as he studied the grain of the wood on the door.

There was a long stretch of silence as George considered the question—the longest minute on planet earth.

And then, with a sigh and a hum, he decided, “That isn’t it. That was because they’re alike in other ways.”

“Like how?” Dhani asked.

George smacked his lips.

“Neither of them know how to deal with their problems.”

“Oh.”

And those were the last words exchanged between the two.

Jason sat there forever, watching and listening for any sign of rebuttal, for the clouds to open up and correct the old man’s misspeak.

Him and Ritchie weren’t anything like each other.

_ They couldn’t have been _ .

God, to think anyone would even compare them!

Jason was  _ nothing  _ like that dirtbag of a man, he thought to himself. 

At the very least, he had some common sense.

Still, a whisper grew to a scream in his head, like a dinner bell growing into a gong.

What it said was nothing new.

Just that Dhani, of all people, should have had a good grip on the way things were.

He was too young to understand what was happening, sure.

But he was also too young to hold any biases against his family. He knew nothing of the acid that boiled in Jason’s throat as the bones in his knuckles cracked against his wall. And he was absolutely clueless as to what the words him and Ritchie shouted at each other meant.

He was the same as Jason was in that moment. He was nothing but eyes and ears.

And by God, the young man thought, feeling the room spin and swell around him, all Dhani could hear was that the voices sounded the same—in frequency, in volume, in choice of words.

Maybe—

Before he could flesh out the idea, his feet were on the floor of his bedroom and his nose was stuffed with a fresh row of creamsicle-orange powder.

The coward. 


	4. The Time of These Questions

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh geez oh man oh geez oh man... I have had a wild time writing this (and a wild time with my life overall) lately. Not to mention, this chapter required me to watch a two hour movie for accuracy's sake--highly recommended, by the way--and take notes on it. So hopefully it's clear why this one took a week to get out... 
> 
> Get comfy, folks--after seven days, two hours spent watching and taking notes on the movie Jason is about to see, and a whole lot of writing, the most important chapter in this work is here, in all of its 8,000 word glory.
> 
> (A Dove in The Rosebox is quaking...)
> 
> P.S. Mild spoilers for "Wings of Desire," though it's kind of a difficult movie to spoil???

New Year’s Day 2020 was significant for a couple of reasons.

First of all, a new year had started, and there was a sense in the air that with such a pleasant number to hold those three-hundred and sixty-five days, it was sure to be a good one.

Second of all, it marked the first day Jason Starkey became committed to getting clean from adderall—or at the very least, trying to.

But third, and most importantly, the direct causation of the above event, the young man made what he would forever remember as one of the best and worst decisions of his life, and at five-thirty in the afternoon, piled into Julian Lennon’s extremely crowded car to go and see a movie—driver’s choice—after which dinner would be eaten at only the finest of restaurants, none other than Peking Panda’s Chinese Food and Takeaway.

Unfortunately, Jason never did make it to that bowl of Lo Mein.

But how that happened is quite a tale. 

Julian grinned.

“What it’s about,” he sighed. “Is angels that can read people’s minds.

There was an estranged silence among the passengers.

And then Jason, leaning in towards the driver’s seat, asked, “Really?”

“Oh yeah,” the older man nodded. “Guess it sounds funny to say out loud, but I’m telling you—it’s a movie about mind-reading angels in trenchcoats that walk around Berlin, and it’s one of the best damn movies I’ve ever seen.”

Stella chuckled in the backseat, and hearing it, Jason couldn’t help but turn around.

“Wow,” she jeered. “I never thought you to be much of the science fiction type.”

The driver sighed as he turned a corner.

“I wouldn’t call it science fiction, necessarily.”

Jason let out a yelp as he crashed into Mary on his right.

And shaking his head, Jude went on, “That’s what you get for not wearing a seatbelt.”

“Yeah,” Jason said, disgruntled. “Next time you’ll have to slam the gas and take me out for good.”

“Could be.”

His face hardened.

“But it’s certainly not science fiction. If anything, I would say it’s more… realistic fantasy.”

“Ooh!” Jason taunted. “Then let us gather, ye of the elves! For we shall soon depart for Mordor.”

“Ha ha,” the older man deadpanned. “Very funny.”

He let out a sigh as he searched the car lot for an empty space. “You can all laugh now, but you won’t be laughing on the way back—tell you that much.”

Lee gasped.

“Does someone die?"

“In a way…”

The girl beamed. “Those are my favorite kinds of movies.”

“Careful now,” Julian warned. “I said someone dies  _ in a way _ . There’s quite a distinction.”

“Yeah,” Jason nodded. “You really think you and Jude would have the same taste in movies?”

The driver shrugged. “Maybe when I was sixteen. You never know.”

“Well, alright then,” Jason said, leaning back into his friend. “How old  _ were  _ you when you got your whole life changed ‘cos of The Tale of the Mindreading Angels?”

“Seventeen,” Jude said, not missing a beat. “Still counts, if you ask me.”

Lee only shook her head.

“If everyone lives to the end,” she warned. “You’re gonna have to foot my ticket.”

The driver scoffed.

“In that case, I think I’ll just off myself before the credits.”

Mary laughed.

“I guess then  _ someone  _ would be dead, huh?”

“Yeah,” Jason grinned. “Or you could just kill him yourself, Lee—and I can have his car!”

Julian, parking the car, could only answer, “If you kill me, then I swear to God, I’ll send you all home hungry."

“No you won’t!” Stella protested. “You’ll be dead!”

The man blinked. “Oh. I guess I would be, wouldn’t I?”

“Dead as a doorknob,” Jason agreed, climbing out of the backseat and onto the street. “Now, can we get snacks?”

Shoving his hands into his pockets, Julian shook his head. “If you want to spoil your appetite, then sure.”

“Gee thanks, Da.”

“Don’t mention it…”

There was only one problem with Jason’s plan to eat an entire bucket of popcorn by himself: he was strapped for cash.

Of course, it was only movie theaters that charged an arm and a leg for one of the world’s cheapest snacks, and in hindsight, he should have expected that.

But it didn’t stop him from groaning the whole way along, or moping about overdramatically from the ticket stand to the hallway to the doors in front of the appropriate theater.

It was only once that door into the darkness had opened that he stopped, and quickly at that.

“Jesus Christ,” Julian muttered, picking up his pace as he weaved through the narrow side hall along the seats. “I thought we had more time…”

And time enough they had, as Jason soon discovered.

Jude had his knickers in a twist only because upon entrance into the room, the beginning credits had already begun to roll, names of forgotten German film crews scrawled out in thin white chalk along a night black board.

A strange sort of harmony played in the background as they passed, slow as a dead man’s final blink.

The atmosphere of it all made Jason wonder whether the angels were more of demons—the credits sure seemed to make it look like a horror movie than… whatever it was.

The letters continued to scratch and scrawl their way across the silver screen, the title stretching out like a curse across the board.

_ Wings of Desire _ , it read.

And then came the first shots of the movie.

Clouds passing on a black and white screen as the title slunk away.

An eye opening.

And a camera spinning around from above a city street—all while the strings of a violin ached and yearned in the background.

That was the moment Jason knew he would not understand a single second of that film; It would be a deep one for sure.

It was a thinking man’s movie from the looks of it. It was for the men who stood like the film’s angel on the edge of a rooftop, staring down at the street with sad eyes.

“Dear God, Jude,” the young man muttered. “You shoulda told me they made a heroin overdose into a movie.”

He was met with only a sharp, “No one talks during  _ Wings of Desire _ !”

Jason rolled his eyes.

And before him, the film rolled, too.

The camera moved in and out and around rooms and buildings, reading the minds of nameless Berliners whose thoughts seemed to read more like art critics’ than any real person’s, and it became immediately obvious to Jason that it was not going to be an enjoyable one to two hours.

It was like someone had filmed Yoko’s shower thoughts and threw them on screen, he thought.

How in the hell had Jude ever gotten any enjoyment out of that? Or  _ anyone,  _ for that matter?

The seconds seem to tick by like molasses dripping from a jar, considering how slowly the people in the movie spoke, and how insufferably long it took for the camera to move from one place to another.

If Jason wasn’t so hyperactive, then he was sure he would have fallen asleep.

But after a few minutes, he found himself able to do the one thing he always did, whether he was bored, or sad, or anything else.

He was able to crack a joke.

As the audience found themselves faced with an old man reading a newspaper in his armchair, they heard him ask:

_ “My God, what will become of the boy? He’s only got music in his head. What does he want now?” _

A smile crossed Jason’s face.

“Must be how Baba thinks of me,” he said, leaning in towards Lee.

But Julian, on the other side of the young man, still seemed uptight that Jason was breaking the eternal rule of watching his blasted 1980s German nightmare.

“Yeah,” Julian sighed. “You, me, and everyone else we know…”

“It’s the post-punk daddy issues club.”

The older man shook his head, which Jason reasoned as an acknowledgment that his statement was more than correct.

But the man on the screen had a response to this as well, and this only compounded the joke.

“ _ I’m getting fed up _ ,” he said. “ _ I can’t help him anymore. _ ”

Jason laughed, and to his left, Lee joined in.

“God,” she gasped. “It really is Baba…”

“ _ No wonder. He only learned rock n’ roll. _ ”

“And Dad, too!”

“ _ Maybe he’ll grow up one day _ .”

Jason snickered, and as he braced himself for the frustrated push of Jude’s elbow into his ribs, he read the subtitles on the screen, shifting to a new scene, a new narrator, and a new motif.

“ _ When the child was a child, _ ” a man stated. “ _ It was the time of these questions... _ ”

For some odd reason, the narrator began to sing those questions.

“ _ Why am I me? _ ” the voice lilted. “ _ And why not you? Why am I here? And why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? _ ”

The camera panned over, like an bird spreading its wings across a breeze.

“ _ Isn’t life under the sun just a dream? Isn’t what I see, hear, and smell just the mirage of a world before the world? Does evil actually exist, and are there people who are really evil? _ ”

“Hell yeah,” Julian grumbled. “His name is John Ono Lennon…”

Jason had to cover his mouth to keep himself from cackling as he mocked, squinting his eyes like a true Lennon, “No talking during  _ Wings of Desire _ , Judy!”

“It had to be said.”

“Then in that case,” Jason decided, grinning like a madman. “Richard Starkey’s evil, too.”

And after that, they were silent.

Lee shot a disapproving glance her brother’s way, but he didn’t seem to care.

Maybe their father wasn’t evil—frustrating and dumb as a rock, sure, but evil, not so much.

Of course, neither was Julian’s.

It was a joke—that was all it was.

But with such a sour-grapes response from his sister, it stayed in Jason’s head as he watched the movie; a part of him wished he had just kept his mouth shut.

The angel from the beginning sat in a car with what seemed to be another angel; you could tell because they were both wearing trenchcoats.

And they were human-looking enough, even if the lighter-haired one looked more like a lizard then an angel. 

In fact, Jason thought, they were  _ too  _ human looking. They looked too much like some very specific humans.

That was how they came to be known, at least in the young man’s head, as Ronald Reagan and David Bowie. 

It sure made the film a lot less dull, imagining the former president walking around Germany with Ziggy Stardust.

So time ticked by without a second thought, Reagan and Bowie walking through libraries and around street corners, stepping silently along the corridors of trains as they placed quiet hands on people’s shoulders.

And the strange thing was that whenever they did that, whenever they touched a human, that person’s thinking changed.

The man seated at the end of the train car, for example:

His face was long, his eyes sad as he told himself, “ _ Disowned by your parents, betrayed by your wife… Your children only recall your stutter. You could hit yourself as you look in the mirror _ .”

With eyes like a well-tamed stallion’s, David Bowie placed a hand on the man’s shoulder.

“ _ What’s that? _ ” the man then wondered. “ _ What’s going on? _ ”

Relief crashed over him like a wave.

“ _ I’m still there. If I want it, if only I want it… I must want it. Then I can get myself out of it again. _

“ _ I let myself go _ ,” he decided. “ _ I can drag myself out again _ .”

That was the only memorable moment—at least to Jason—for a very long time.

A trapeze artist soared through a soon to be torn down circus tent, a man bled out in a car wreck, and after staring for ages at the woman in the air, Ronald Reagan stood on the shoulder of a golden statue, motionless.

It was dull to the young man in the theater—nothing but a blur of blacks, whites, and sounds. 

Until the trapeze artist (whose name was revealed to be Marion) began to shed her clothes, anyways. That really peaked Jason’s interest.

But it only lasted a moment, much to his discontent.

For an uncountable number of seconds, he let his eyes wander through the theater, counting the number of silhouettes he could see against the black and white film.

And then, diverting his attention, the screen seemed to shake.

No, he thought, not the screen, but the camera.

The film seemed to have traveled back in time, the quality of the video noticeably worse as the subject of the film grew much more sinister.

On the screen, without any warning or censorship, Jason saw the wide-eyed body of an infant staring at the sky.

It was dead, he realized, fear chilling his bones.

There was blood stained at the edge of its mouth.

More bodies made their way onto the silver screen, those of children and adults alike. 

He couldn’t make out, at the time, what they had died from (maybe he was in too much of a state of shock) but it would grow clear rather quickly.

Oddly enough, he seemed to be the only one so alarmed by the footage. Stella, he saw, while pale, only expressed her concern to her sister, leaning into the mess of dark hair otherwise known as Mary and exchanging hushed whispers. 

And Lee—perhaps on account of her penchant for the morbid—didn’t seem all that phased.

It was only Jason who butt his chin into Julian’s ever-so-valued personal space and hissed, “For fuck’s sake, man! You didn’t tell me there was gonna be dead kids!”

The older man hummed, only half-listening as he answered, “Well, I never said it was gonna be a happy movie now, did I?”

Jason squinted.

He was tempted to chew Jude out for a bit, but there was no point in that.

Instead, he just leaned back in his chair and frowned.

A man stood in some kind of attic trying on hats and—thank God—speaking English.

But Jason couldn’t seem to get past the earlier scene. 

There was something about it that made his skin crawl, made his stomach sink more than he had expected, and it took a good while of aimlessly staring at the attic in the movie before he realized what it was.

It had simply been that the infant had reminded him too much of his four month-old niece.

How about that, he thought. 

He really did care for that chubby little idiot.

Once he had collected himself, having realized the root of his fear, he cast his gaze back on the film.

It had—admittedly—peaked his curiosity, what with the dead children and all.

And it was only then that he began to connect the dots.

The film was doing something very strange right about then—the film crew for the film  _ Wings of Desire  _ was filming a fictional film crew filming a fictional film.

In other words, the plot had shifted to focus on the making of a movie.

A movie, that is, about the second world war.

Oh, Jason thought.

The bodies.

The children.

The footage.

It was a shred of a bygone era, a picture of a moment frozen in time.

It was the bombing of Berlin.

It had to be.

The thought didn’t sit well with him; he had never had any particularly strong feelings about any war, and especially not about which country committed which crimes.

But his discontent didn’t give him a single moment to spare, as before he knew it, the footage was rolling again—and in color this time, a rare occurrence for the time period.

It was a building, at first, so crumbled and ruined that it could have passed for an ancient relic.

And then a woman knitting some ruby-red thingamajig, fully in view now that her apartment wall was blown off the face of the Earth.

It was strange, the young man thought.

Women in long skirts walked through the rubble of the Reich, searching with handkerchiefs pressed to their lips for any shred of the world they used to know.

It made Jason think, for the first time since his eleventh year history class, of the women in the rubble of Liverpool.

The way he had heard his late Grandpa Harrison tell the story, the city never truly recovered from those days of smog and nights of fire.

He used to furrow his brow—in the same way as the carbon copy he called his youngest son—and recall tales of himself and the neighborhood children searching for coins and playing hide and seek in the charred remains of destroyed buildings, finding themselves in all those places where less than ten years earlier, their mothers had gathered all they could from the streets, trying in vain to keep calm and carry on as they searched for food and possessions that no longer existed.

Jason could almost see it—his great-grandmother, children at her hip, clawing through the wreckage of what once was, but now wasn’t.

Funny, he thought.

Her grandson did the same thing.

He did the same damn thing, stepping over the crumbled ruins of his house with Dhani at his side, pretending that there was some shred of the life they had before still in that rubble.

What had ever happened, Jason wondered, that had taken those days away?

He ruminated over this for a while, unattentive as to what was happening on the screen, and in the end, he decided that the blame fell solely on his father—not George, but Ritchie.

It was him who had to start drinking in the first place, and it was him who, having cut the shit and given everyone a real sense of hope, had to start drinking again.

It was him.

It was  _ all him _ .

Those were Jason’s thoughts, and he sat in them for quite a while, like a child sitting in its bathwater.

But just as quickly as he had fallen into his head, he fell out.

A voice rang out, a narrator.

And words were written.

“ _When the child was a child,_ ” the man stated for the thousandth time (this motif seemed to be the film’s calling card, after all.) “ _It choked on spinach, peas, rice pudding, and steamed cauliflower, and now eats all of that_ — _and not just because it has to._ ”

Jason blinked.

“ _ When the child was a child, it woke up once in a strange bed, and now time and time again. _ ”

The young man’s eyebrows raised, reading the subtitles.

They made him think of sunlight through a window, of green walls and sheets with dinosaurs on them—of the scent of his sheets as he awoke, for the very first time, in that blue-doored house in Orrell Park.

When he had woke up once in a strange bed, he thought.

It was surreal—and it only got worse from there on.

“ _ Many people seemed beautiful then, but not so many anymore. Only if it’s lucky. _ ”

Jason squinted, his breath stopping cold as it left his lips.

“ _ It had a perfect picture of paradise, and now can only guess at it. _ ”

It was like the screen had read his mind—like there was a real angel inside of it, listening to his inner monologue.

And that monologue was nothing special, of course. Not at that moment, anyways.

There was only one word ringing out inside of Jason’s head—a name, a face, a reason for the rubble, and a remnant of his picture of paradise.

Ritchie, he thought.

That bastard.

It was like the quote had been tailor-made for him—he had been one of those beautiful people to Jason, even if only in a bygone era.

He had been his protector.

He had been his constant.

He had been the one man the boy could always have counted on.

And by the time that boy turned nineteen, Ritchie wasn’t anything but a stumbling drunk in the kitchen—a bomb dropped on Liverpool in the middle of the night, leaving silent men and curious children in the wake of that old picture-perfect scene.

It made Jason angry that the man could ever have done something so cruel to the portrait he painted.

It made him want to slam his fist into something, to feel the heat as his burning knuckles pressed against the coolness of drywall, or the fluff of a worn-down pillow, or better yet, the familiar warmth of skin.

That was it, he thought.

He wanted to slap his father until the drunken red flush fell clean off his face.

He wanted to look him in those half-open blue eyes of his, his own eyes burning like fireworks set off in a petrol station, and he wanted to chew his father out harder than that one piece of gum Sean Lennon always seemed to have stuck in his mouth. 

Just once, he wanted to see his father admit that there was no cause of the family’s problems but him.

He wanted to hear him tell the truth—and George along with him.

He wanted to watch them realize that their son no longer saw them as those beautiful people they once were.

For God’s sake, he thought, no one saw them like that anymore. They hadn’t in years!

But that was where Jason found himself hung up like laundry on a sunny Sunday morning—he used to see his fathers as righteous men, or at the very least, as redeemable ones. He had seen them as the people that took care of him, and for the longest time, he hadn’t been able to see what a lousy job they really were doing. 

But he knew why he had been so blind; it was obvious.

He had been a child.

And when the child was a child, so the movie said, it saw everyone as beautiful.

There shouldn’t have been any reason for him to be so angry, really. It was a part of growing up—having to learn that some people weren’t the golden idols you made them out to be. 

But it wasn’t a part of growing up, at least not for everyone, that those golden idols were their parents.

And even worse, Jason could only think of one person that had to have that realization twice, and that was himself.

Once when he was seven and curious as to why he was the only kid in his class without a mother to write to in May, and once when he was sixteen and found his father’s seat at the dinner table empty for the first time in years.

His mother, he thought, bouncing his leg if only to keep himself from going crazy, why in God’s name was he thinking about his mother?

He didn’t even remember what that woman’s face looked like—just that she didn’t give enough of a damn about her crotch goblin to keep him around for more than two years.

But did he ever think anything about her?

Did he ever see  _ her  _ as beautiful, he wondered, or did he simply not know she was there?

Was he ever old enough to form an opinion on her?

Surely he had to have thought she was good at some point; she had been his mother, and that was an immutable fact.

He had been her son at one point, even if he no longer considered himself to be.

He  _ had  _ to have loved her one of those days. 

He had to—because in every record made of that day at the laundrette, he had been crying.

That meant he had missed her, surely—it must have meant he cared.

And to a certain extent, he thought, she must have cared, too. 

After all, if she had been mean to him, overlooked him, neglected him, or otherwise made him feel bad, then he, at two years old, would have distanced himself from her. He would have been glad for some release at the laundrette.

So she had to have cared!

But that was the problem.

She never did, Jason thought, because for heaven’s sake, people who cared about their children didn’t leave them good as gone in a laundrette without any intent of coming back to get them.

It wasn’t that his mother had ever cared for him—clearly—it was just that he cared too much for her.

His cheeks flushed, absorbed in his thoughts as frantic, muted voices called out on the screen.

What kind of an idiot was he when he was a child, putting every ounce of trust and faith in people he knew damn well didn’t care?

His mother didn’t care enough to even see him.

And then there was that God-awful wreck, that dumpster fire of a person, that sad excuse for a man he called—

A tormented, throat-tearing scream interrupted, “ _ Nein _ !”

And with that, Jason was snapped back into action, his eyes returning to the screen only to find a hunched-over David Bowie on the roof of a building, and an empty space to his right.

The young man’s heart began to beat faster than a battle drum, his eyes wide as black holes in the outer edges of the universe.

“He jumped,” Lee gasped.

Julian nodded. “Told you someone died.”

Jason heard their words, but he couldn’t comprehend them.

Soon after the scene changed, and the audience found themselves once more on the shoulder of that golden statue.

The only difference was that this time, it was David Bowie who stood.

After only one second, simulating the young man he had watched from earlier, he jumped off.

And that was where things  _ really  _ changed.

Jason grew sick, his head spinning and swelling as the camera shook harder than an infant tree in a tornado. 

Music—if you could call it that—blared into his skull, the spiking sound of sliding violin strings and screeching sirens only serving to increase his terror.

Images blurred by on the silver screen, but in them, Jason only saw his own thoughts.

How had he ever been such a fool to open his heart?

How could he have sabotaged himself like that?

And how could Ritchie have been so cruel as to give his family a false sense of hope for his future?

A couple fought on screen.

What in God’s name had changed to lead George and Ritchie from being so intoxicatingly in love to being repulsed at the mere thought of each other?

And more importantly, why should Jason care any? Wasn’t it him who used to beg his father not to rest his head on his Baba’s shoulder?

He supposed he should have been more careful what he wished for.

Goosebumps dotted the young man’s flesh.

As if in some kind of cruel irony, like the universe was making a mockery of his unexplainable panic, like the whole world was laughing at the weightless feeling in his body as he tried desperately to make sense of his entire life, a boy appeared on the screen.

He was standing on the corner of a street, crying, with his eyes shut tight and his mouth opened wide, for what must have been— _ it had to have been _ —his mother.

Jason was lost in the theater, looking up at a world around him he couldn’t make sense of, just the same as when he was two years old and searching for a woman in the washing machine.

He was absolutely helpless, he realized; the thought weighed him down like a block of lead.

He was always so sure of himself, wasn’t he? He was always so sure that the only two things he would ever need to succeed were himself and the great big world in front of him—everything and everyone else was miniscule.

But there he was, sitting between his sister and Julian Freaking Lennon, and he was just as lost and alone as when he was a boy.

If he was in anything resembling a right state of mind, then he surely would have been kicking himself in the arse—metaphorically speaking, that is.

He wasn’t the helpless type.

He was the street-smart wise-guy, the self-assured comic of the neighborhood who, when life got tough, fastened himself a helmet and braced for impact.

He wasn’t the kind of guy to break down.

Yet there he was.

The strange thing about it all was that he felt nothing as it hit him how needy he was in that moment—no anger, no resentment, no channeled-inner-peace-mindfulness shit.

Of course, he supposed it was hard to try and feel something when you weren’t sure whether or not what was happening to you was real.

That was really how he felt, if anything; that the world around him, with the screen and the angels and the now-dimming music, wasn’t actually there, and he wasn’t actually seated in that chair with the lingering feeling that he needed someone’s arm to hold on to, someone with the strength enough to protect him longer than any of his other so-called protectors had.

There was nothing in his heart as the camera panned over to Marion dolling herself up for her next—and final—show.

But there was a gnawing notion somewhere in the back of his brain, poking and prodding at his thoughts so as to remind him that as much as he used to love Ritchie, that man he met as a boy was gone.

In place of him there was a man with graying hair and breath that stank of beer.

And in place of whatever love used to be there, no matter how foolish it was, there was only resentment and anger, manifested under dark night skies as slamming doors and bleeding fists.

Jason sat contemplating this for quite some time, circus music swirling and swaying in the background as Ronald Reagan looked up at the trapeze artist, enchanted by the silhouette of her body as it danced in the stage lights.

His heart began to soften, his chest growing larger with each breath as, very slowly, he began to calm down.

But there was still that ever-present shred of fear in between his ribs—fear for himself, his father, his mother, and even the dead man at the bottom of that Berlin building.

And more importantly, he found that as his fear decreased, his sense of rage picked up the pace.

Fortunately for everyone around him, however, it was a muted, tame sort of rage he felt, not at all like his standard vocal-cord-destroying, finger-breaking episodes. 

Again, a result of his newfound existentialism and numbed mind.

As the film rolled on and on—to which he only half paid attention, though he was significantly more invested then he was before—he seemed to think simultaneously about everything and nothing.

His thoughts moved in circles, much in the same way as the trapeze artist, asking repeated questions of why and when and how.

But in the same thought, he would deny any questions were being asked.

It was a dream, he decided.

He was having some sort of nightmarish, circus-themed fever dream served to him on a silver screen by Julian Lennnon and his cursed taste for 1980s German movies.

He wondered vaguely how many hours had passed when he heard his sister next to him.

“Oh hell yeah,” she muttered, eyes glued to the screen as she smirked. “Now that’s what I’m talking about…”

The young man looked up, blinking a couple of times so as to more fully immerse himself in what he had to admit was reality.

Depicted in that black and white footage was a familiar scene to the row of teenagers and/or young adults—and especially to the Starkey siblings.

It was a club: dark, hot, and filled with swaying people and swelling post-punk rock.

Marion stood inside, her hair curled and sprayed high enough to tickle an angel’s chin as she rocked her hips from side to side, dancing to the crooning music of a surely drugged-up and unintelligibly singing frontman. 

No wonder Lee liked it so much, Jason thought.

Marion looked just like her, dressed all in black and weighed down by cheap, heavy jewelry.

As the camera panned over to the show the band, Jason felt a poke at his ribs.

“Guess you guys really made it,” Lee jeered. “Huh?”

The young man frowned, taking a moment, in his stupor, to find the strength to ask, “What?”

“You guys made it!” Lee repeated. “The Nudists!”

“Oh.”

Jason turned back around without much fanfare, studying the band as they strutted their skills.

That was what was most familiar about the scene to him. The view of the crowd from the stage.

See, at the suggestion of his brother, Jason had been let in on what he considered (however foolishly) to be his real job—the loud-mouthed, powder-snorting drummer of Musty Jack Sponge and The Exploding Nudists.

Whether or not the others had wanted him there or were just in desperate need of a drummer was unclear to the young man.

But he knew for sure that up on that pedestal was where he was at that point in his life, and he intended to stay on it for as long as he could.

Watching the bodies move around on that screen, however, he began to ask himself just how long that was.

Where did he think he was going, he wondered, drumming around in pubs until four in the morning just to come home high and stare at his shoes?

It was an uncomfortable thought for him—he could almost hear it said in his father’s voice, slurring just a bit as he warned the young man of his haphazard days doing the same, drumming for days and nights in Hamburg until he and his friends were quite literally deported and sent home with not a single Euro left in their pockets. 

Ritchie had always been quick to discourage his sons away from music performance—even if he had done the same in his younger days.

He had these notions in his head, particularly about Zak, that his children were better than such a life, and that they should aim for nothing less in life than what he thought they should.

Translated for minds like Jason’s, he was a drunken square.

And there wasn’t anyone Jason wanted to listen to less than such a person.

But when the thoughts came from his own head, he decided, it was different.

Maybe it was the depth of the film that made him think, but for the very first time, he wondered what sort of path was he heading down, what sort of destination he would reach at the speed he was traveling.

Did he like his life as it was?

He wasn’t sure.

He sure liked getting around the town with The Nudists; they all got along just fine, even if he was rarely seen as much more than the guitarist’s kid brother. 

And he seemed to enjoy snorting all of his pills, he thought.

But that was what gave him pause.

For the first time in his life, it hit him.

And to his surprise, it came to him softly, spoken as a plain statement of fact rather than screamed as an insult against the self.

It wasn’t that he liked doing adderall anymore, the voice said.

He just liked himself better high—he liked  _ everyone  _ better high—than he liked himself sober.

His pills kept him from having to face either of his fathers, from having to try and figure out something to say to his sister, and from having to explain to Dhani that his suspicions were spot-on, and that their family was broken as a junkyard television.

Most importantly, he thought, they kept him from having to think the way he was doing at that moment.

They kept him from having to talk to himself.

His head swelled as the music continued to play, and in the midst of his visions of himself and his pills and his kid brother, he was reminded of that scene from before Christmas where he had sat on the steps and listened to Dhani stammer out his thoughts.

What had struck Jason that night—more than anything else—was that the boy had compared him to his father.

It was a comparison he refused to accept, expelling the thought from his mind with (what else but) another snort of his drug of choice.

But looking back on it in sobriety, and especially in the presence of angels, there was no choice Jason had but to concede the battle.

The flag was lowered.

The walls around his heart were crumbled.

There he was, at all of nineteen years old, running from every issue that faced him with adderall stuffed in his pockets and not a pound left to spare. 

He would come home late enough at night that, after so much time, his Baba had stopped wondering where he was.

He would punch his walls and lose his voice shouting, his fist banging into the paint like the mallet of a bass drum.

It really was true, he thought, wasn’t it?

He really was like Ritchie.

His head seemed to be melting from the inside out as he thought, wide-eyed in a mix of the shock, terror, and expectedness of the realization.

It was true that he wasn’t wholly invested in the film before him, but he wasn’t wholly uninterested, either, and so paid special attention as the club disappeared, and in its place, the camera came to focus on…

The corners of his eyes drew nearer together.

It was a laundrette.

Of course it was.

The scene seemed to stop his heart, his fingers twitching as colors began to appear on the screen—blacks and whites and yellows and teals.

And from there, after just a minute, the narrator returned.

“ _ When the child was a child _ ,” it began.

Jason’s brow furrowed.

“ _ It was the time of these questions: _ ”

The voice began to sing, “ _ Why am I me, and why not you? Why am I here, and why not there? When did time begin, and where does space end? _ ”

The young man’s eyes grew wide.

“ _ Isn’t life under the sun just a dream _ ?”

There was only silence as the voice faded, but inside of Jason’s head, it roared like nothing else, singing his skull and contracting all the muscles in his face, his breathing staggering like some kind of twisted concerto as his stomach churned.

Well over halfway into the movie, he was only then beginning to unravel the quote’s meaning.

Why  _ was  _ he himself, he wondered, and why not Ritchie?

He thanked God under his breath that he hadn’t had the money for snacks—he was sure they would have come back up by that point.

What was there that still separated the two? 

If they were so alike, Jason thought, in the way they doused their problems with liquids and powders, in the way they screamed and shouted and threw their fists at the wall, in their carelessness and in their mannerisms—then what differences still existed?   
What made him any better of a person than his father, walking out on his whole life to take a trip to a pub?

He thought about it for quite some time.

And the unfortunate answer he came up with, as Ronald Reagan approached one of the actors in the film within the film, was that there was nothing in the way but his own ego.

For all intents and purposes, by every measure he could come up with in his self-critical state, Jason and Richard Starkey were one in the same.

As you should have no trouble imagining, the young man wasn’t very much pleased by that.

His first instinct was to deny it.

But denying wasn’t going to cut it anymore, not now that he had been able to see through his own smoke and mirrors.

He was going to need something better.

And as luck would have it (though it was up to fate whether that was good or bad luck) a movie theater on New Year’s Day was not a feasible nor appropriate choice of location for a much-needed trip on adderall.

Not that it would have done much, anyways—it was as possible that he would have ended up thinking  _ more  _ about the situation as it was he would have found something minute to distract himself with.

A very fickle thing, adderall was.

Either way—Jason’s one goal, seemingly necessary for his survival, was to find some way to separate himself from his father.

And his first thought in doing so was simple: he would run.

He would run as fast as his legs could take him, far away from that crummy house in Orrell Park, and even further away from that bearded buffoon.

The only problem was that he wouldn’t have known where to go.

So being one of those more unproductive members of human society, those that spend years of their lives trying to figure out how to do less—being lazy, that is—Jason decided that running away from home was a terrible idea.

If anything, he would have to move away.

But he didn’t have the money for that (not yet, anyhow) and so he was left with only one option.

If he couldn’t physically separate himself from Ritchie, he thought, if he couldn’t ever put enough space between the two to reverse the effects of living with such a miserable mystery of a man, then he would have to destroy the tendencies that made them so similar.

In other words: 

If he didn’t want to end up a stranger in his own home by the time he was twenty, standing at the end of a bridge burned three separate ways—one for himself, one for his father, and one for the rest—then Jason Starkey was going to have to take his brother’s advice.

Jason Starkey was going to have to get sober.

It was enticing, he thought, it really was.

But it wasn’t much more than a fantasy, implying that he would have to engage in that God-awful thing called critical thinking.

It meant he would have to take a good, hard look at his life, and go on guessing and checking how to make things work until eventually, they did.

It meant he had to ask why and what and how come; he would have to put his socks on like Zak said, and introspect like Julian.

And speaking of Jude, it was only at that point that Jason began to feel a sense of annoyance with the mulleted man to his right, dragging him out like a body in Stalingrad to see one of his movies without any idea what sort of change it would inspire in his friend.

It made Jason wonder just what went through the other man’s head when he had seen the film.

But that was a matter much less pressing than the question in front of the young man:

Would he live as he was or die trying to change it?

And as his eyes glazed over, just barely able to register the Berlin Wall in the background of the current scene, he contemplated this.

He had no answer, in the end.

Fortunately, Ronald Reagan seemed to.

“ _ I’m going to enter the river _ ,” he announced to David Bowie. “ _ Old human expression, often heard, that I just understood today. _ ”

Mary gasped.

“Oh my God… wait…”

Julian only grinned as the young woman turned to him, her voice at as loud a whisper as there was as she said, “He’s going to try and be a human, isn’t he?”

Jude laughed.

But Jason shushed them both.

He had more important things to hear.

“ _ Forward in the ford of time, _ ” the soon-to-be-former angel said. “ _ In the ford of death. We are not yet born, so let’s descend. To look is not to look from on high, but from eye level. _ ”

A chill trickled down the young man’s spine, like someone had poured cold water down his back.

Of all the minds to read in the film, why had the angel chosen his?

After some time describing what he would do on his first day on Earth—his first day  _ really, truly  _ on Earth—the second angel smirked.

“ _ None of it will come true _ ,” he said.

His friend beamed like his face was the sun itself.

In that moment, the screen grew colorful once again.

And on the ground appeared a footstep, leading right to where the former angel was standing.

Ronald Reagan died in David Bowie’s arms.

And when he woke up, he was on the other side of the wall.

“There it is,” Julian said, pleased with the scene. “He’s really done it.”

And he had.

He bled from the forehead and saw in color, speaking to children and grown men as he tried to find his way in the world.

He gave directions to passersby, met with the actor he had seen earlier—who, as Julian just  _ had  _ to explain, had also been an angel at one point—and then, finally, he walked away to go and find his true love.

She was waiting in the dirt as the circus packed up, but by the time he reached it, she was gone. 

He sat there for a while—Cassiel, that was his name—he sat in the dirt and waited for her to come back.

But she didn’t.

And after a painfully long scene of the two walking around and asking where to find people they had never met before, their paths crossed.

As luck would have it, their paths crossed at another post-punk concert.

Karma really had come for Jason, hadn’t it?

Moments passed, the frontman writhing and calling out on the stage as his bandmates made strange sounds with their fingers, and finally, Marion spoke, both to herself and to Cassiel.

“ _ Now it’s serious _ ,” she stated. “ _ At last it’s becoming serious. So I’ve grown older _ — _ was I the only one who wasn’t serious? _ ”

Jason swallowed his suspense, pushing it deep down into his chest.

In the end, it wasn’t the dead babies that had interested him in what the movie had to say.

“ _ I must put an end to coincidence. The new moon of decision… I don’t know if there’s destiny, but there’s a decision. _ ”

It wasn’t God, either, or any sort of cosmic hand that glued his eyes to that screen.

“ _ Decide _ !”

In the end, what forced Jason to pay attention to Julian Lennon’s movie about the rise of the mindreading German angels was—as he liked to think—an angel itself.

Maybe only a metaphorical one, he decided.

He didn’t have enough time on his hands to put him through a sudden crisis of faith in addition to his current crisis of identity.

“ _ I am ready. Now… it’s your turn. _ ”

There was some reason he had to see that film, he was sure of it.

It seemed that in the end, after all of his realizations and ruminations, Jason was the only angel knocked down to Earth.

There was just one question left:

“ _ You hold the game in your hand _ .”

What would he do there?

“ _ Now, _ ” Marion reminded. “ _ Or never _ .”


	5. Baba and the Beast

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Friends and family, boys and girls and everybody else, women, children, and sentient birds, rejoice! KeirMoonrock is alive and has not abandoned their series! 
> 
> I know it took a lot longer for this chapter to come out, a lot longer for my standards, at least. And while that's partially because the original version sucked like you wouldn't believe, I have to acknowledge that it sucked because--plainly put--I've been in a really sucky state lately. My mental health has really taken its twists and turns (go figure... the author that writes so much about psychology needs to apply some to themself XD) and as a result, I've had to take some time off from writing. The product of such forced penmanship was... less than stellar... or for that matter, less than comprehensive. 
> 
> I've since rewritten this chapter, much to the excitement of my beta reader, but be advised:
> 
> It well may be that in the coming year, my uploads grow less frequent. It all depends on how my treatment progresses, and really, just how I feel day-to-day. You bet your bottom dollar I'll be trying my best to keep a reasonable pace, and you bet your whole darn life that I'll keep on with this series, but understand that things have been quite shaken up on my end, and seeing as such, so has my writing. 
> 
> Thank you in advance for understanding--I know it's a long note, but I do want to be transparent. And hey, as irony would have it, I now have a better grip on how to write characters with mental illnesses.
> 
> All that said, please enjoy!
> 
> \- KeirMoonrock

Dhani stopped dead in his tracks.

“You really mean it?”

Hearing the question, and especially the confused sort of way the boy asked it, Jason could only stare at the dust gathering on his dresser.

“Sure I do,” he shrugged. “Not like I had anything else going on.”

But then his face grew serious.

“Unless Baba’s makin’ spinach pie—in which case, Dhani, I’ve just vanished into thin air.”

“Like heck you have,” Dhani scoffed. “Besides, you don’t have to worry; it’s just tomato soup.”

His brother let out a sigh, hinting at his true state as he pushed his hands into his pockets and made his way out of the room, thanking God for the lack of his all-time least favorite dish on the table.

It was a small comfort, sure, but Jason would take anything he could get.

See, six days had passed since Julian had dropped him off at his house with wishes to get well soon, having left the movie theater white as a sheet and caught in the fever dream to end all fever dreams.

He was never really sick, of course. Not in the physical sense—he checked his temperature when he had come home, just to make sure.

But after seeing the movie, struggling to grab a hold of his life without a map to lead him to his final destination, the young man sure felt sick of himself.

He hadn’t slept a bit that night, not because of adderall in his nostrils, for once, but because of all the thoughts in his head.

What he had worked out, by the time the sun came up, was simple. In the end, he had known it to be the answer all along.

If he wanted to be proud of himself—if he wanted to be able to say one day that he had been any better than Ritchie, then he had no other choice but to get clean. 

Still, just because it was the answer didn’t mean Jason had to like it.

And that leads us back to the young man trudging through the hallway with his brother by his side.

The funny thing about wanting to do something (anything worth doing, really) is that as soon as you came face to face with it, your first instinct is to back out as soon as humanly possible.

Those six days sober had been some of the longest of Jason’s entire life. Not to mention some of the least predictable.

There had been series of hours—twelve, seventeen, twenty-four, and upwards of thirty—where the young man’s stomach had been completely empty, the sour taste of hunger in his mouth, though he never really noticed it.

And there had been equally long periods of time in which his eyes stayed wide open, wide awake for morning, noon, and night.

It was almost funny, in a way. 

Withdrawal from adderall had felt a lot like being on the drug at first.

But there was one major difference—and that was the soul-crushing, head-smashing, hope-destroying depression Jason found himself in. 

He would lie curled up in his bed for what felt like years, just sitting in his own thoughts and cursing himself for not doing anything else.

It was a bit of a snake that ate its own tail, a cycle of sorts—he would break down about the smallest things, cry for a good long while, punch his wall, make himself as small as possible in his bed, and then just think.

After a while, he would start bashing himself. That’s when his thoughts turned to poison.

What was he doing with his day, he wondered, just hiding in his room above everyone else, no better than a lone bird in a nest at the top of a twenty-foot tree, and not even having any fun?

Fun, now that was his vice. 

The one thing Jason Starkey craved in his life was to let loose and have a little fun. That was the driving force in his life, getting him into all sorts of trouble and leading him to all sorts of pleasures. 

It wasn’t that he wanted the things he did to be meaningful or productive (he would usually delegate those tasks to the freakish multitasker known as High On Adderall Jason) but more so that he wanted what he did to be enjoyable, at least to him.

Even if he spent a whole day in bed watching Indian men build pools on YouTube, speaking to no one and mindlessly eating whatever crisps he had left on his desk the month before, if he was having fun, he was fine with it.

And lying in bed miserable and angrier than a mad dog on steroids was not exactly the young man’s definition of fun.

It just brought his mood down even more, just made him wonder why he should even bother trying to get clean when he was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t, caught between turning into his father on adderall and turning into an unrecognizable shell of himself in sobriety.

The depression—that was the constant throughout those six days, as luck would have it, along with some skull-shaking headaches, stomach-churning bouts of nausea, and adderall cravings like you wouldn’t believe.

But there wasn’t much else that could be called constant.

See, on the days he was doing things other than not realizing he was hungry and not being able to sleep, he was busy eating everything in the house with an unusually insatiable appetite, sometimes growing emotional over how good the food tasted to him, and missing out on whole days sleeping soundly as a newborn sloth.

It was the strangest thing that had ever happened to Jason, and as if that wasn’t enough, it was also—by a  _ long  _ shot—the worst.

He felt like an idiot no matter what he did.

He felt stupid for having thought sobriety would have been as simple as falling into David Bowie’s arms and waking up on the other side of the wall.

But he felt like he was making it out to be worse than it was, too.

God, he thought, head pounding as he walked down the hall. If he was going to crash and burn on either path, then why shouldn’t he have crashed and burned on the path that kept him feeling like the world around him was real?

That is to say—what genuine reason did he have to get clean? Was there one?

The question had plagued him ever since he stepped out of that theater with Julian.

And for the first five days, he had always managed to come up with some sort of answer.

The sixth… now that was a different story.

That was part of the reason he had agreed to go with Dhani, actually. Because the pills tucked away in the corner of his sock drawer didn’t care how well he had done so far in his quest not to end up like his father—and neither did his cravings.

He had been so close to tearing open that bag when the boy walked in, dangerously close.

His thoughts had begun to suffocate him, creeping into his head like bile up his throat.

He needed something to distract him, at least for a short while.

And Jason had to admit—without a memory of his last meal, he couldn’t help but feel his mouth water at the mention of any food that wasn’t spinach pie.

By the time the brothers reached the kitchen, Lee was already seated at the table, and their father was squinting his eyes as he dug his hands through one of the drawers, mumbling something unintelligible to himself in his frustration.

Ritchie was, to no one’s surprise, not there. 

No one wondered where he was, really. There was only one place possible, and that was in a crowded pub with a beer in his hand, sitting by his lonesome as he tuned out the much-too-loud game of football on the TV overhead.

It was more expected, by that point in time, that by the time supper began, the man would be gone. 

It was the standard.

It was just what the family had come to accept—and that was what really bugged Jason.

He took special care in watching Dhani take his seat, making note in his head of the boy’s nonchalance about the whole thing.

Dhani didn’t seem bothered at all by the empty chair beside him. In fact, he never did.

It was so strikingly different from what Jason would have done—from what he  _ had done _ —at his brother’s age.

In those days, as their father faced his first bout of alcoholism, it seemed that all Lee and Jason ever did was ask why his chair was empty at night.

Of course, it was a much less common occurrence when he was seven.

Maybe that was why he and his sister were so curious about it all, he thought. Just because it happened so rarely.

It was the off-chance mystery that they never got an answer to, their Baba’s brow furrowing, his lips turning downwards in a recognizable frown as he hesitated to say that their father must have been working on the checkbook, tucked away in the broom closet he called his office, and set to return soon enough.

But the days stretched by, and with them, the nights grew longer.

Ritchie’s absences from the table slowly grew more frequent, and just as slowly, they came to take up more of his time.

When he did return—and he sometimes didn’t—it would be much later than before. 

But the one thing that increased more than anything else, the one thing that tripled, or maybe even quadrupled, all without anyone’s noticing, was Jason’s perception of it all.

He began to take note of just how unusual the situation was, how  _ other people’s  _ parents always seemed to be around for them.  _ They  _ always seemed to come to supper no problem.

He began to take note of the tension that arose between his fathers, how one day they simply stopped talking to each other the way they used to.

But more than anything, he noticed the shouts and swears that inevitably came with Ritchie’s stumbling return to the house.

He heard the arguments clear as day.

He heard the accusations, the defenses, the insults… and he heard the crashing of plates and tumbling of houseplants, no matter how hard he tried to pretend he didn’t.

It had a very real effect on him at the time—quite a noticeable one, too.

That was around the time he developed (what he liked to think was) his tough-as-nails attitude.

That was when he really became self-sufficient, and that was when he had started palling around with Jude.

The creation of the Post-Punk Daddy Issues Club, if you will.

But there was something in his brother that he knew was different. 

Dhani, sitting at that table and tilting his head at the various dishes George set in front of him, didn’t seem to think much of Ritchie’s absence.

Even when the empty space rang out louder than the bells of Hell, the boy was deaf to it.

A sick feeling grew in the bottom of Jason’s stomach, and he wondered for a moment if there was still a way for him to back out of the dinner.

Maybe Dhani was deaf, but it was becoming abundantly clearer that for the first time in his life, he was starting to tune into the sounds around him.

It had been confirmed on that night at the top of the stairs—Dhani had started to recognize that not everyone’s families fled from each other every chance they could get.

Hell, Jason thought, the boy had figured things out ages before he could.

He had been the first to pick up on Jason and Ritchie’s similarities.

But there was a critical difference between Jason and Dhani.

Dhani had never known any other life.

That was a blessing and a curse, really. It meant that the sand was still in the hourglass, that there was still time before the boy was faced with the realization that his family was different because it was broken.

But there was the caveat—when the realization did come, like an angel waking up for his first day on earth, when the child no longer was a child, when it became clear to him that not every person was beautiful, there was no telling what it would do to Dhani.

It would come upon him ten times harder than it had ever come upon Jason.

And  _ that  _ gave him not only pause, but a reason to give up hope. 

There was the cannibalizing snake.

Oh, who had ever thought to give the young man a brain? And what for? Just to torture him?

By the time it had hit Jason that the world around him was not only still there, but was  _ real _ , George was already dishing out soup to Dhani and insisting that the boy could not leave the table until he had eaten his broccoli alongside it.

This was met—understandably—with some whining on the side of the boy, but it was quelled just as quickly with a sigh from George.

“Nice to see you here, Jay,” he said. “I take it you’re feelin’ better?”

Jason shrugged. “Some.”

His father didn’t meet his eye as he responded, “Well, I’m glad to see you’re well enough to eat. And get some water, too, while you’re at it—last thing you need is to be dehydrated.”

“Mm-hm.”

That seemed to be the end of the conversation, at least as far as Jason was concerned.

He scarfed down his soup without so much as a peep, his eyes permanently transfixed on his cutlery so as to avoid the crippling dread that came along with looking anyone in the eyes.

The people around him—he supposed he could call them his family—they talked just the same as they usually would.

Lee was told to put her phone away.

Dhani blabbered on about his scores in maths.

And for the most part, George just smiled and nodded.

But what was louder than the sound of their voices was the silence of Ritchie’s.

It was the strangest thing to Jason. He hadn’t noticed it in years.

Of course, he thought, of all the nights to notice it, the universe had chosen that one.

That was the growing theme of his life, at least for that past week or so—he was starting to notice things he hadn’t.

He was looking at the world through a new lens, the lens of an angel, if you will.

All of a sudden, things lined up in a way they hadn’t before. Things in his life made sense in the worst way possible.

For the very first time, the young man was thinking critically. He supposed it was true that for the first time in his life, he was thinking,  _ period _ .

And he almost wanted to think of it—thinking, that is—as a disease. It was some kind of a plague, taking hold of his mind and locking him inside of it.

He wanted to blame thinking for the state he was in, for the all-consuming dread he felt looking at the things that never seemed to bother him before.

But it was really more of a cause and effect type situation.

It wasn’t that thinking was the problem—it was the root of the dread.

When he thought critically; when he took the time to use his brain for something other than laughing at dumb jokes he made himself, he became aware of reality.

Joking was good, he thought, fine and dandy as far as coping mechanisms went. 

But no amount of jokes could ever fix your problems.

That was something you had to do yourself. It wasn’t enough just to overlay your parents’ names onto a Spongebob clip and call it a day.

But there was nothing else Jason knew how to do.

His brow furrowed.

His soup had gone cold.

There was nothing else he was good for.

The depression lingered over him, fuzzy and jet-black, with matted fur and invisible eyes.

It made no sound.

It made no movements.

It just sat behind him on its massive hindquarters, pressing its weight down on top of Jason’s head, the pressure increasing with every awful breath of the beast.

The young man couldn’t find it in him to add anything to the meaningless conversations around him. 

But in a strange sense, he didn’t want to leave, either.

He supposed he was scared of what he would do if he went back upstairs.

He didn’t trust himself enough not to open up that sock drawer and make everything even worse.

So he spent his time just sitting there, mindlessly spooning tomato soup into his mouth. And he was okay with that.

If only that was all he had to do, he would be okay with that.

He would be alright if the whole world just stopped, and he was left right where he was, sitting and eating tomato soup in silence.

No people around him.

No cares in the world.

No waiting on his father to come home and start smashing the plates.

It was a dream.

Somewhere behind him, the doorbell rang.

That was all it was.

He didn’t care enough to turn around and see who it was as George opened the door.

But it didn’t take him long to figure out.

Just hearing the boy’s voice triggered Jason’s gag reflex. 

The war between the two had started out as a joke—it always had been, really. 

Jason may have been pretty awful, after all, and maybe even a little more than  _ pretty _ , but he wasn’t awful enough to hate a ten year-old’s guts.

But in such a state, surrounded on all sides by his own misery, he was having a hard time convincing himself that he didn’t want to drop a hydrogen bomb on the gum-chewing, sir-saying, head-nodding teenybopper that was Jude’s American half-brother.

To make a bad situation worse was George:

“Why don’t you come in for a moment? It’s much too cold for you to be out here without a jacket…”

Jason rolled his eyes so hard he was sure he would lean back in his chair and die.

Without even looking, he knew when Sean had set his eyes on him.

It wasn’t hard to tell, what with the coy and overexaggerated, “ _ Hi _ , Jason…”

“Kid,” the young man grunted. “I’ll push you down a manhole.”

Sean got a good laugh out of that one.

If only he knew that Jason was serious.

Fortunately for Sean and his family and friends, the boy didn’t have enough time to keep pestering Jason.

He was busy telling some story about digging for coins between his great aunt’s sofa cushions, which quickly devolved into doing the same thing in his own house… and somehow that connected to James McCartney, the arcade, and a once in a lifetime opportunity that Dhani couldn’t under any circumstances miss.

“He may never get the chance again, sir,” Sean was quick to clarify.

None of it made sense to Jason; none of it felt real.

Sean Lennon might as well have been hidden behind a foot of fog, his voice and figure hazy in the mist that was the young man’s depression.

He couldn’t make sense of anything that was going on around him, nor could he make sense of the things happening to him.

It felt like he was spiraling into nothingness, like he couldn’t stop himself.

It felt like there was nothing left to do in his life, no matter what he did with it in the moment.

Funny, he thought, hearing his brother call out the door for Sean to wait up.

He had never been the suicidal type.

And he still didn’t think he was.

But he was beginning to see what led some people down that path.

As the door shut behind the boys, Jason heard his father let out a sigh.

He lifted his head a bit, surprised to find that he was the only one still sitting at the table.

George was standing upright at the end of it, his bowl in one hand and his spoon in the other, finishing the last bit of his soup before filling the cutlery into the dishwasher.

“Where’s Lee gone?” Jason managed to croak out.

Swallowing his spoonful, George sighed, “Must have slipped off while I was sayin’ goodbye to the boys. You know how she is.”

The young man let out a soft hum.

But as he returned for another helping of the soup—it was undeniably one of those  _ eat everything in the house  _ days—he felt something itching, or burning almost, beneath the familiarity of his jacket.

It took him a moment to figure out what it was; in fact, he was only able to do that once the man spoke, his voice portraying genuine concern:

“Are you alright, love?”

It was the pressure of George’s eyes upon him, burning holes in his skin and clothing as he wondered to himself what in God’s name his son was up to.

Jason stared up at him, eyes dull as a rock.

“You don’t seem like yourself,” his father continued, turning around to load the dishwasher. “You were awfully quiet tonight…”

The young man stirred his spoon around in his bowl, caught in a trance as the metal moved through the liquid.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I still don’t feel great.”

“No?”

“Not really.”

George shook his head. “You were well enough to eat, though… have you got a headache?”

“Like you wouldn’t believe…” Jason scoffed.

“Maybe you ought to see a doctor.”

Hearing that, Jason set his spoon down. 

Though he was sure he would have George’s full support in the pursuit of sobriety, talking to the man about his drug habit was about as comfortable as sitting on a cactus.

“Just give it a couple of days, Baba. It ain’t all that bad.”

“If you’re sure,” the old man sighed. 

A brief silence found its way in between the two then, creeping around the room like a wolf around its prey.

Jason slurped his soup, and George muttered curses to himself as he tried to find space in the dishwasher for all of his pots, pans, and plates.

But other than that, there wasn’t much to be said.

So the young man found his eyes wandering to the empty seat at the table as he ate, and after downing the very last of his meal—it had to be, he thought, or else his father wouldn’t have anything left to put in the fridge—he asked to no one in particular:

“When do you think he’s comin’ back?”

This was a bit of a stupid question in retrospect. In fact, Jason regretted it almost immediately. 

It was pointless to ask, that was it. There was no telling when Ritchie would find his way home, or for that matter,  _ if  _ he would find his way home. 

It was up to fate, in the end, or if you were to ask George, it was up to the smiling figures standing atop the table in the living room, surrounded by offerings of fruit and incense.

But the truth—no matter how much the young man hated to admit it—was that Jason didn’t want to leave the table. 

He was scared of what would happen if he did, and moreover, he was scared of being alone in the state he was in.

It was hard to reckon with, but truth be told, Jason Starkey wanted nothing more than a good hug and a shoulder to cry on relentlessly.

Heaven knew it had been ages since he had given anyone in his family a hug.

So there it was, his reasoning for the question, be that what it may.

George frowned in response, his brow furrowing and his head shaking a bit as he sighed, “He’ll be back in his own time, love.”

“Yeah,” Jason grunted. “At four in the morning.”

“As long as he comes back, that’s all I care for.”

The old man let out a sad laugh.

“Long as he comes back in one piece,” he added. “And on the bus, too… now that’s more like it.”

“Maybe he shouldn’t come home,” Jason mumbled, speaking more about himself than anyone else. “Lord knows it’d do us all some good…”

George was quick to turn around, hearing that. 

Still holding his sponge—seemed that the pot just couldn’t have fit—he put his hands on his hips, his lips curled into a grave, if not unfamiliar, frown.

“Come on now,” he said. “Is that really how you feel?”

Jason rolled his eyes. “No, Baba, I feel like it’s all sunshine and rainbows and he ain’t got any problem at all.”

“Jason Starkey…”

For one time in his life, the young man didn’t bother throwing any other punch.

That is to say, Jason didn’t seem to have the energy to think of some sort of defense.

He just sat there and took it.

“I’m not going to let you talk about your father like that,” George went on. “He might have his problems, sure, and you can bet on your life that I wish he didn’t, but he’s still your dad, and he still deserves respect, just the same as anyone else.”

Jason crossed his arms, slinking down in his chair.

For all George wanted to preach about respecting Ritchie, he sure didn’t practice it.

Nothing said respect, the young man thought, like shouting at your husband that he was a lousy excuse for a man, walking out on his kids every night to take a trip to the local pub.

His father sighed.

“And I’m not tellin’ you that I’m alright with him not being here, ‘cause let me make it clear,  _ I’m not _ . If he walked in right this instant—well, he’d be in quite a lot of trouble, I’ll tell you that much.

“Breaks my heart in two,” the old man admitted. “That he can’t just sit down for one night once I’ve made all this food… but you’ve just got to roll with the punches sometimes.”

“You’ve just got to let him drink himself to death?” Jason asked, deadpan.

George shut his eyes tight. “That isn’t what I’m saying. But for heaven’s sake, tellin’ him over and over again that he’s ruining his life isn’t going to help anything. Believe me, love, if it did work, he wouldn’t be like that anymore.

“It’s something he’s got to realize for himself,” he said. “I can’t convince him to do anything, try as I may. That’s something I accepted a long time ago.”

“So what?” the young man grunted. “You just accepted that he’s a drunk and isn’t ever gonna change?”

“What I  _ accepted _ —” George said, as though in warning. “Was that when someone’s got a problem like that, with drugs or alcohol or anything else under the sun, they’ve got to see for themselves that they have to change. You can’t just convince an addict to stop shooting up, because in their minds, they don’t see that there’s anything wrong with it. Sometimes, you’ve got to let a person hit rock bottom. Sometimes it’s the only way they learn.”

Jason furrowed his brow.

“You’re wrong about that.”

“How so?”

“You’re wrong saying that it’s the only way to learn.”

George let out a sigh. “Well, I never said it was the  _ only _ —”

But his son wouldn’t let him finish the thought.

“No,” he said. “No, it doesn’t take a fuckin’ trip to hospital or somethin’ to get that you’re being an arse.”

He struggled to put his stream of consciousness into words, going on, “You just gotta get it… you know? You just have to have some reason for it. Like you look in the mirror and you don’t see nothin’ but a junkie cunt staring back at you. And you hate him so much you just have to change. That ought to be enough to get shit through your head.”

George pursed his lips, and with a deep, dramatic sigh, resolved, “Could be… could very well be.

“You know,” he added. “You should talk to Zak about that, if you’re really curious. He went through the whole thing, of course. He might have somethin’ worthwhile to say…”

But in his state, Jason didn’t hear him.

He was too busy thinking to himself that with all that projection he was doing, he could open a goddamn cinema.

He wasn’t talking to George, in the end—not about the junkie cunt, anyways.

He had been talking to himself.

He hadn’t had any rock bottom moment, after all. It hadn’t took a hospital trip, or some health scare, or going broke before he was able to realize that he had a problem.

That was what he tried to tell himself.

But the burglary charge begged to differ—and so did Ronald Reagan down in Berlin.

Thinking of it all, Jason scowled, and a new realization hit him square on the head:

He wanted to think he was something better than Ritchie. 

He wanted to think that he could recognize his issues before he lost everything at their expense.

He wanted to think that he could get clean without making a whole fuss over it, that he could do it all on his own.

More than anything, Jason Starkey wanted to prove himself to be better than his father.

And in thinking this, he was torn. There was a part of him that wanted to sink into his own misery, to bash himself on the skull and scream that he couldn’t ever be better than that piece of shit. 

But there was another part of him—smaller, but still there—that whispered in his ear, making the hairs on his neck stand up as it told him to pick himself up and keep on with it.

He had every reason in the world to get sober, it said.

And if his father had a hundred more that he was slacking on, then that was his own damn problem.

Ritchie could do whatever he wanted.

But Jason would never let himself get to that point.

If he ever did, then he swore to himself on that night that he would strap his body to a rocket and have Jude light it, going out in a blaze of glory as his limbs exploded in front of the moon.

That is to say:

It was either sobriety or shame so strong it could kill.

It was either sobriety or death.


	6. The Lesson Learned

Jason couldn’t bear to think how loopy he must have looked, standing outside of Zak’s door with wet hair, a red face, curses on his lips, blood on his knuckles, and the red mist of rage on his mind.

And he could only imagine what his brother must have been feeling, coming to his door with a five month-old in tow only to find some mad dog with a mullet telling him:

“We ought to talk.”

But in the time it took for Zak to hand his daughter off to Sarah, grab a can of Red Bull, and situate himself and his guest in the living room, Jason had decided that he just didn’t give a damn about much anymore.

He wasn’t in any state to care, really.

But that wouldn’t stop Zak from caring, a worried frown on his face as he said, blunt as a rock, “You don’t look so good.”

“Yeah,” his brother scoffed. “No kidding—I look like Hell.”

“You get jumped or something?”

“Wish I would have.”

“What’s with the hair?”

“I took a shower, dumbass.”

Zak’s eyes widened, blinking a couple of times as his frown grew more intense.

“Well…” he sighed. “Could I ask what’s wrong?”

No response.

“You don’t have to tell me,” the host was quick to add. “You can just sit there if you’d l—”

“Oh,” Jason groaned, frustration seeping from his skin. “I don’t know, I don’t know, I  _ don’t know _ !”

His brother pursed his lips, his brow furrowing at the sound of the young man so genuinely beside himself.

“It’s just—” Jason tried to explain. “God, it’s just a long story. That’s all. It’s a long story and I haven’t got the first idea how to tell it, and I don’t even know what I’m doing here, for fuck’s sake, and… and…”

Zak’s voice cut through his spiralling train of thought.

“Hey,” he called. “It’s okay. You just take your time, kid—it’s not like I’ve got any plans or anything.”

But his brother didn’t seem to get the message, insisting, “I ought to go. Really, I ought to… God knows what I’m doing here.”

“Come on, now. You’ve come all this way.”

“What do I expect you to do?” Jason asked, repulsed by the sound of his own voice. “Really? What the hell are you supposed to do?”

Zak’s eyebrows raised. “Well… I think it’d be a lot easier to figure that out if you told me what your problem was.”

The younger man’s face fell, his muscles unclenching as he leaned back in the sofa.

“I’m trying,” he reminded, voice meek as a mouse. “Problem is, I don’t have any idea where to start…”

Zak laughed to himself.

“Have you tried the beginning?”

Under normal circumstances, Jason might just have gone along with the bullshit.

Unfortunately, by that evening, normal circumstances were in very short supply, and so the only response the young man could manage was no response at all.

He was caught in his own head, trying to figure out what in God’s name the beginning of the story even was. 

“Hell,” he grunted. “If you wanna start there, then I ought to start by tellin’ you about some mindreading German angels."

Zak was—understandably—confused.

“I’ve got time for that,” he said, a coy smile crossing his face.

His brother was not nearly as amused.

“Look,” he finally resolved. “You remember when I got arrested and you gave me that whole song and dance about putting on some fucking socks?”

Zak pursed his lips, his brow furrowing as he leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. 

“Gave me a whole intervention and everything? That spark your memory at all?”

“I suppose it does,” the older man sighed. Then, looking up abruptly, he asked, “That wasn’t what made you feel like shit—was it?”

Jason shook his head.

“Hell no,” he said. “Mostly, I just wasn’t listening to you. But after Christmas Jude took me out to see a movie—that’s where the mindreading German angels come in, but we haven’t got time for  _ them _ —”

Zak chuckled.

“And while I was watching it,” his brother went on with a sigh. “Well… I’m not so sure what happened, but it sparked something in me.”

Jason frowned.

He knew damn well what he had to say next.

But he was too proud to actually do it.

Too bad there was no other choice.

“I guess,” he sighed. “I guess watching it, I just sort of chickened out and realized you were right.”

This seemed to spark the older man’s curiosity.

Jason shook his head. “It finally hit me that I had to at least  _ try  _ and get clean. Heaven knows nothin’ good’s gonna come out of this shit.”

Zak was quiet for a moment.

And then, raising his eyebrows just slightly, nodding his head and frowning, he said, “Oh.”

Jason waited for a moment.

Nothing.

“Is that all you’ve got to say?” he finally asked, still wound up like a jack-in-the-box.

“Well—no,” Zak said, trying (and failing) to make himself comfortable in his chair. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m really happy to hear that…

He laughed. “It’s just strange to think that someone’s actually taken my advice for once.”

Jason scoffed. “What, do you hang out exclusively with junkies?”

“No, no… of course, I wouldn’t call Jack and all of ‘em the pinnacle of sobriety, but… you know. Usually I just talk a lot and nobody ever bothers to listen. It’s a weird feeling, knowing that someone actually did.”

“Yeah,” the younger man sighed. “Well, don’t go givin’ yourself too much credit—it’s Jude’s fault for making me watch that shit.”

Zak chuckled. “Maybe I ought to take a peek.”

“Don’t,” Jason warned in complete seriousness. “I’m pretty sure you legally have to be an art student, a psych major, or an arse that takes themself way too seriously to get anything out of it.”

“Then dye your hair and stare at naked ladies, Jay! You left the theatre with something, now, didn’t you?”

He rolled his eyes.

“That’s not the point. Look—all that matters is that I saw Jude’s movie and I’ve been takin’ your advice ever since. Now pat yourself on the back and get on with your life.”

“Will do,” Zak sighed. 

For a moment, he just stared off into the distance, his eyes glassy.

And then, after thinking for a moment of how exactly to respond—Jason knew the man’s habits better than he knew his own sometimes—Zak nodded.

“So you’ve been workin’ on getting clean,” he said.

Jason shook his head.

And that was when his anger flared back up.

“You could say that,” he grunted. “But you’d be lyin’ your arse off if you did.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Did just fine for a little bit—I mean, I wasn’t  _ literally dying _ —and then last night I had to go and wreck it all for myself because why the hell did I think I wouldn’t?”

“You relapsed?” Zak asked, the concern in his voice loud enough for Jason to want to rip his ears off.

Just hearing the words put the young man on the defense.

“If that’s how you want to put it,” he grumbled. “Then sure. I went off and I got high again.”

He dug his heel into the floor, shaking his head as he added, “Don’t know what the hell I thought I would do, of course… God knows I can’t stick to nothin’...”

Zak let out a sigh. “Come on, now—you’ve got to give yourself a little credit.”

“What, for staying up all night buzzed outta my goddamn mind?” Jason raged. “For fuck’s sake, they ought to give me a Nobel Peace Prize for that one…”

“You know that isn’t what I mean, Jay.”

That might have been true.

But it didn’t do anything.

Jason went on, so aggravated he could no longer sit still, “Goddamnit, you don’t get it! I— I was doin’ just fine, and then I had to—”

Zak cut him off, unusually calm and quiet.

“Well,” he said. “You’re wrong about that one.”

“About  _ what _ ?”

The older man sighed.

Tilting his head, turning his eyes away from his brother and towards the window, he explained, “You said I don’t get it—and, don’t get me wrong, there are things I don’t get. What can I say? It’s a different thing, adderall… but I have been there.”

He paused.

“I  _ do  _ know what it’s like tryin’ to get clean.”

“No, you fucking don’t!” Jason cried, thinking for negative ten seconds before he opened his mouth. “You don’t know half the shit I’ve gone through in the past couple of—”

The young man never got the chance to finish his sentence.

See, if nothing else about Zak was immutable, then at the very least, there were two things:

He was impulsive, courtesy of his ADHD.

And he took no one’s bullshit, courtesy of his troubled childhood in the foster care system.

Jason really should have remembered that.

But as fate would have it (though the causes  _ were  _ different) he was the exact same way.

It made for a very interesting dynamic.

“Then tell me,” Zak said, cold as stone. “If I don’t get what you’ve been through, then tell me, ‘cos you’ve told me jack so far, you have.”

“You wanna know what I’ve been through?” Jason hissed. “I haven’t slept in days, I’ve eaten everything in the house and then some, and I don’t feel  _ dogshit _ anymore—that’s what I’ve been through! For a whole fucking  _ week _ , nonetheless! God damn!”

But the older man didn’t respond.

This was partly because he wasn’t sure what to say.

But it was more so because his brother, having pushed his anger and every other emotion he had felt in the past week so far down inside of him that it was beginning to eat him alive, just could not seem to shut his mouth and stop talking.

He went on, “I can’t look nobody in the eyes anymore, I can’t do nothin’ but lie in bed and cry myself a river, and on top of all o’ that, it’s like Hiroshima’s just gone off in my fuckin’ head! 

“It’s shit!” he cried. “It’s Hell on Earth! It’s the worst damn thing I’ve ever felt! And the worst part of it all is that that’s what  _ I gotta do _ ! That’s what I’ve got to keep doing if I don’t wanna end up OD’ing in a gutter somewhere and dying before I’m twenty-five!”

He shook his head, his fingers curling and the muscles in his hand clenching as he spat, “That’s what I’ve got to do if I don’t wanna end up as good as Dad…”

For a while, the only sound to be heard was the methodical dripping of water from the faucet in the kitchen nearby.

Zak kept quiet, his brow furrowed and his lips pursed beneath the hand on his chin.

Just as the man on the sofa beside him opened his mouth to keep on talking, he muttered, “You got that much right, at least…”

“What’s that?”

The older man raised his eyebrows. Finally removing the hand from his chin, he said in a long, single breath, “Well, at least you know th at you’ve got to do it. Doesn’t make it any easier. Not at all… but at least you know you’re toast if you don’t try.”

“I know shit all the time,” Jason scoffed. “But that don’t mean I use it for anything. Hell, usually it just means that I ignore it anyways.”

Zak met his brother’s eyes.

“Are you ignoring it now?”

The younger man ran his hands up and down his elbows, rolling his shoulders back and turning away from Zak as he answered, “I guess not…”

“Then you’re off to a good start. There are lots of guys in your situation, I think, that’d just look at relapsing and go, ‘Well, I guess I’m fucked no matter what,’ and then keep up with whatever it was they were doing before. Like they’re just not meant to get clean.

“Other people can do it just fine,” he went on. “You know? They can hear all sorts of stories about how  _ other people  _ were able to do it, how Johnny What’s-His-Face has been sober for fifty years or something, but that doesn’t matter much to  _ them _ . They’re just built different. Someone else can get sober all they want, but at least in their own head, there’s something wrong with them that means they won’t ever be able to.”

Looking up again, he asked, “Does that make sense?”

“I guess so,” Jason shrugged. “Makes me wonder if you took your meds this morning, if anything.”

Zak laughed. “Aw, sorry for the rambling—”

“It’s alright.”

“I did take ‘em, you know… I suppose I’ve just got a lot to say on the matter.”

Jason couldn’t help but smirk as he jeered, “You always did love the sound of your own voice…”

“Where were we?”

“Praising me for my wondrous deeds,” the young man said without missing a beat, taking a small bit of comfort in knowing that he was returning to a more normal state. “Knowin’ I oughtta get clean, savin’ babies from burning buildings… the like.”

His brother grinned. “Yeah, that’s it…”

But then his face grew serious. “Really, though,” he said. “It says a lot about you that you know that much. You’re not out here trying to justify it or anything.”

“I guess… I don’t know. Now I’ve just got to make the leap from  _ I oughtta do it _ to  _ I’m actually doing it _ .”

“And you’ve already done that.”

Jason frowned.

Turning to look the older man in the eyes, he sighed. “Hate to burst your bubble, mate, but I’m not  _ doing it  _ anymore. God… not after last night…”

“Hey,” Zak insisted. “That’s alright—you had a relapse, and that’s okay. That happens, you know? That’s… that’s part of the process! Not sayin’ it’s a good one—”

Jason’s eyes bulged. “Clearly. I mean, I’ve spent the whole day beatin’ myself up for it… got a couple new holes in your old wall to prove it.”

“Exactly. It sucks—and I’m not trying to downplay that, it really does. But you can’t be so mad at yourself, kid. It’s just a part of the process, at least for right now. 

“But you can’t say you’re not trying until you stop trying. Take a look at yourself—you could easily have gotten mad about it and done it again, and instead you came and you saw me! That’s an improvement, now, isn’t it?”

“Still got mad about it,” Jason sighed. “But sure, I guess it is.”

Zak sighed, a faint smile crossing his face.

“You’ve got to give yourself a little credit, Jay. I swear to God, every time I try to tell you you’re doin’ good, you’ve got a reason lined up and ready to prove me wrong.”

The younger man slunk his body down on the sofa—somehow lower than he had before. 

“That, my friend,” he said with a grin. “Is the life of a pessimist.”

“Perfectionist is more like it…”

Silence found its way between the two, each man lost in his own thoughts.

But it was comfortable this time. It wasn’t a silence made up of the burnt ends of thoughts and slow simmering resentment, but a natural lull in the conversation of two people so close they felt no need to speak to one another.

For the first time all day, Jason’s mind went mute.

It was quiet around him now; it was peaceful.

There was no buzzing in his head, no hive of bees in his brain, no red rage flowing through his veins. 

He was nowhere near pleased with himself—he reckoned that he’d be angry about his relapse for quite some time—but at the very least, he was able to take a moment and stop thinking.

There was nothing in that room, he thought, but himself and Zak, along with the sofa, the rug, the TV, and a can of Red Bull.

Well, there wasn’t anything else in the room until Sarah came in. 

Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, her makeup sparse and her ears bare (for the first time ever) in what Jason affectionately referred to as  _ New Mum Chic _ . 

Creeping her head in through the doorway, she asked, “Everything alright in here?”

Zak’s eyes snapped into focus. 

“Oh, yeah,” he said, blinking. “Yeah, we’re fine now.”

“You alright, Jay? Can I get you anything?”

Jason lazily looked over his shoulder, a certain mock-drowsiness in his voice as he answered, “A three layer black forest cake would be great, actually. The kind with the dollops of whipped cream and cherries on top, cut into ten ten-centimeter slices exactly.”

His sister-in-law laughed, having learned a long time ago just to roll with the punches. 

“You want milk with that?” she asked.

“No, ma’am. I want only the richest of creams—”

“Cut it out, now,” Zak said in between laughs.

“Farmed from an albino cow off the coast of Bangladesh—”

“Jason!”

“Whose name has been blessed by thirty-four Hindu monks and the Dalai Lama.”

“Okay, okay,” Sarah sighed. “I give up. We’ve got water, milk, baby formula, and Red Bull. Take your pick.”

Jason finally let go.

“Aw, don’t worry about it. I’ll just fix myself a nice, cold glass of nothin’.”

“You sure? It really isn’t that big of a deal, you know—”

“Yeah, don’t worry. If I want something, I can get it myself.”

Sarah seemed skeptical, but she went along with him.

“Alright,” she said. “In that case, Zak...”

Her husband’s eyes bulged, his head snapping into place as he looked at the woman and blinked.

“I should be off. You two will be okay by yourselves, won’t you?”

“Of course,” Zak nodded. “Yeah—no problem.”

“Thought so. I just put Tatia down for a nap an hour ago… she should wake up at some point.”

“Nothin’ we can’t handle,” her husband sighed. “Is it, Jay?”

“That’s right. We’ll just put her in the microwave for a couple minutes. That oughtta smooth her out.”

Sarah rolled her eyes, walking away from the doorway.

As she fastened her coat and looked in the mirror for the final time, straightening her hair before she went out, she added, “Make sure he doesn’t break anything, Zak!”

The man gave a thumbs-up.

“Will do.”

The last thing she said before the door closed:

“Heaven knows you ought to watch him closer than the baby…”

And both brothers got quite a chuckle out of that. 

Still staring at the empty space where his sister-in-law used to be, Jason asked, “Where’s she off to, anyways?”

“Lunch with her sister and some friends,” Zak sighed. “That makes us the men of the house.”

“Us and Tatia, you mean.”

“Yeah,” The older man smiled. “Her too.”

He opened his mouth, eyebrows raised like he had another joke to tell.

But instead, Zak’s face hardened. 

“You know,” he said, turning to his brother. “Maybe you ought to find yourself someone like her… that might help you.”

“If you know any birds that actually  _ want  _ to look at my face,” Jason deadpanned. “Then by all means, tell me.”

Zak pursed his lips.

“Not like that… someone to talk to about this all, that’s it. That way you don’t have to keep everything to yourself.”

He paused.

“I guess that’s sort of what I’m doing, isn’t it?”

“Yeah,” Jason sighed. “I’m pretty sure we had this conversation when I got arrested.”

“Sorry.”

“Don’t matter to me—you’re probably right, anyhow.”

“Could be… All I mean is that havin’ Sarah around was really what helped me. Maybe havin’ someone else would be good for you…”

He met Jason’s eyes then, an unmistakable seriousness in his eyes.

“You’re always welcome to talk to me, you know.”

Jason shrugged. “I figured as much.”

“I mean that—any time you need me, I’ll be here.” Zak laughed. “It’s not like I sleep much anymore, after all… Ugh....”

He trailed off for a bit, likely trying to remember when his last restful night of sleep was.

“Anyways,” he coughed. “Tell me—do Dad and Baba know you’re tryin’ to do this?”

“No,” Jason grumbled.

“Then that would be my first piece of advice. I think you oughtta tell ‘em as soon as you can.”

The younger man turned to his brother, staring at him like he had just told him to dive into a vat of boiling oil.

“What are you,” he spat. “Crazy?”

“Do I look crazy?”

Jason raised his eyebrows. 

“You want me to be honest?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Zak sighed. “I know you probably think I’ve lost my mind, but hear me out for a second—it’s not like they don’t know you’ve been doing adderall, is it?”

“Well, who do you think picked me up from jail? The tooth fairy?”

“Exactly,” the older man said. “So they know that much. And they weren’t too pleased with you for that, were they?”

“What are you gettin’ at?”

“Well…” Zak hesitated. “All I’m saying is that if you told them, they’d have your backs. They can help keep you in check, you know? It’s what they did for me.”

Jason opened his mouth to speak.

But he was cut off, his brother continuing, “And then you’d have two more people to talk to. It doesn’t just have to be me that bears the brunt of it.”

“Yeah,” the younger man snapped. “That’s nice and all, but until Baba can turn around and say the same thing to Dad, I ain’t tellin’ him shit.”

Zak frowned.

“What you’re forgetting,” Jason went on. “Is that you were gettin’ sober back when he already was. But it’d just be hypocritical for him to tell me to get clean while he’s downing twenty cans of beer a night.”

His brother didn’t seem to have any response to this.

Not one that made any common sense, at least.

“I don’t know…” he said, unsure of himself. “Maybe it would be a wake-up call for him, seein’ that you’re going through the same thing he is. Maybe if he sees you come out the other side okay, so will he.”

Jason shoved his hands as far down in his pockets as they would go. 

“Like hell he will. You ever seen that guy? For God’s sake, you could put the meaning of life right at the tip of his nose and he wouldn’t notice.

“Shit…” he added. “Even if he  _ did  _ notice he wouldn’t care. He’d just pretend he didn’t see it.”

“But Jason—”

“And it’s not like Baba’s any better. The second you tell him he ought to get some sense smacked into him and divorce that oaf, he starts fussin’ like you’ve just said you took his shrine out with a cricket bat.”

“Jason,” Zak pleaded. “They care about you! Dad cares about you, and I really think that if he just saw what all this is doin’ to you—”

The young man’s blood began to boil.

“What kinda world do you live in?” he asked, jaw clenching like a mad dog’s as it snapped its teeth. “What, do you—”

His brother’s face fell, his muscles freezing perfectly still.

“God,” Jason spat, trying his hardest not to send the man into a childhood-trauma-induced breakdown. “You just don’t get it, do you? You don’t… you just sit here these days with your wife and your blasted baby and you think everything is just the same as when you left. 

“Well, let me tell you something, and you ought to listen to this—it’s not the same anymore. It’s not anything like it used to be, and it hasn’t been for a long time.”

Zak stared down at the ground.

For an awfully long time, he said nothing.

And were circumstances different, then Jason very well thought that his brother would stay silent for the remainder of the evening.

Fortunately for him, a third party found its way into the conversation, the fussy, familiar sound of an infant’s cry standing Zak right up.

“I’ll be back in a minute,” he muttered.

Jason didn’t do much while his brother was gone—there wasn’t much to do but listen to the sound of his footsteps upstairs and stare at the god-awful rug beneath his feet.

It looked like someone skinned one of the McCartney’s dogs and threw it over top of the living room floor, he thought to himself, adding a layer of disgust to his already simmering anger.

Hearing the sound of Zak’s boots on the stairs, his voice unusually high-pitched as he asked his daughter who was in the other room, Jason turned around.

The girl was tucked safe and sound in her father’s arms, her eyes wide as she slowly pulled her hand out of her mouth.

“Yeah,” Zak cooed. “There he is… say, ‘Hi, Uncle Jason!’”

Jason flashed a peace sign at the infant.

“Just let me fix her a bottle real quick,” the older man sighed. “You wanna hold her?”

The young man squirmed. “If I’ve got to…”

“You should,” Zak laughed. “Who knows, it might help you feel better.”

“Didn’t Sarah warn me not to break anything?”

“Oh,” Zak chided. “You’re not going to break her. Just support her head and you’ll be alright.”

“Anything you say…” Jason mumbled, awkwardly extending his cradled arms to take hold of the girl.

“Thanks,” his brother laughed, passing the infant onto him. “You’ve got no idea how much easier this is with two free hands.”

“I can imagine…”

Staring down at his niece, Jason squinted.

He had never been much of a baby person—if such a thing existed—and in fact, he seemed to have a habit of looking at the tiny humans like they were some kind of curious scourge on the world. 

It had happened when Dhani was born, and it had happened again with Tatia’s arrival. Every time he went to take a look at an infant, he would end up with a sour sort of face, a mischievous grin accompanied by a tight squint of the eyes.

He supposed he looked a little like a baby himself, doing this.

If nothing else, then he must have looked funny.

His niece certainly thought so, pulling her hand out of her mouth and giggling as she was placed in her uncle’s arms.

Damnit, Jason thought to himself.

Zak was right—to try and be angry while holding a laughing little baby was like trying to mix oil and water.

If you tried hard enough, maybe you  _ could  _ do it.

But it would be a monumental waste of time and energy.

In the kitchen next door, Zak sighed.

“We were on Dad and Baba, now,” he said, cursed by his cycling memory. “Weren’t we?”

Jason frowned. “I guess so.”

After taking a moment to specifically concentrate on measuring Tatia’s formula, his brother carried on with their earlier (admittedly less fun) conversation.

“I’m not trying to push you one way or the other,” he said. “And you’re right in telling me that I don’t know what it’s like anymore… But for heaven’s sake, Jay, it wasn’t  _ that  _ long ago that I moved out. We’re goin’ on a year now, we are.”

Jason stared into the girl’s eyes.

She froze as soon as he did so.

“In the end,” Zak shrugged. “It’s really up to you. If you want to tell ‘em what’s goin’ on, then that’s fine. And if you don’t, that’s fine, too. It’s your call.”

The younger man waited for the but.

There was always a but.

“But,” his brother sighed. “I really do feel like it’d be a good idea if you did. Baba wouldn’t be wonderin’ what you’re up to all the time—I know you hate  _ that _ . And… you know… maybe it’ll make Dad realize he’s got his own issues to sort out.”

“You know what I think?” Jason asked, shaking his head. “And I mean this—I don’t think he’s ever gonna get shit sorted out.”

A flicker of fear gleamed in Zak’s eyes.

“Why do you think that?”

“‘Cause he tried, for God’s sake! He tried to get sober and he did for a little while… I mean, you remember! We all thought it was great!”

He swallowed, if only to keep the stones in his throat from tumbling out.

“And look what’s happening now—we’re all worse off than we ever were the first time.”

Zak stared at the ground, his brow furrowed, his lips unmoving.

“It takes somethin’ a lot more serious than just talkin’ to someone to realize you’re screwing up your whole damn life,” Jason muttered. “And if he’s seen the shop tank, watched me get arrested, figured out Dhani doesn’t know much about him besides his name and that he’s mad at him, and he  _ still  _ doesn’t think he’s in the wrong…”

The young man paused.

“I’m sorry, Zak. It sucks to say it, but I don’t think he’s ever gonna realize.”

Zak pursed his lips.

And after a moment of silence, he simply looked up and said, “It worked on you…”

“What the hell d’you mean by th—”

“It worked on you,” the older man repeated. “I was able to talk to you and tell you that you had a problem, and that worked on you. Now you’re tryin’ to get sober.”

Jason felt the hairs on his neck stand upright.

“That’s different,” he said. “I saw the movie, too, remember?”

Zak let out a long sigh and turned to Tatia.

Smiling as he looked at the girl, he explained, “It’s all just coincidence, really. That’s what I like to think… you just need to be in the right place at the right time… and then you’ll figure things out.”

He frowned.

That was when he turned back to his brother.

“But it isn’t just that simple,” he said, stony. “If you want things to change, then you don’t get the right to sit there and complain about them without doing anything."

“Piss off,” Jason huffed. “I  _ try  _ to do my part—I try to talk to Dad and Baba and all the other bozos around. It’s as good as talkin’ to a wall.” 

Zak rested his head on his hand, and another, longer sigh escaped him.

“I guess I don’t really know what I’m talking about,” he admitted. “I’m just tryin’ to help, I am.”

Hearing that, the younger man’s heart was softened.

“You are…” he said in earnest. “And—shit—for all the hell I’m puttin’ you through, I’d say you’re doing a pretty great job.”

“Don’t say that,” his brother laughed. “You’ll jinx it.”

“Eh. You deserve to hear it.”

“And you deserve to get clean,” Zak shot back, serious as ever. “You keep that in mind, now.”

Jason’s face contorted.

He had never been one for serious conversation.

But still he found himself trying to respond to the statement, and in the end, he would say he did an alright job.

“I know that much,” he said after a while. “Believe me, I’ve got my reasons.”

“Then don’t forget ‘em—that’s my advice.”

Zak nodded. 

“Don’t forget ‘em, don’t be too hard on yourself, and don’t keep everythin’ in your own head.”

“Is that what we’ve learned today?” Jason gushed, imitating only the most infuriating of children’s television hosts.

His brother, having heard more than his fair share of such characters in the past five months, seemed to get a rise out of this.

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “I reckon it is.”

Smiling, he added one more thing:

“Feels nice to have someone actually listenin’ to me for once.”

“Nice to be hearin’ it, too,” Jason shrugged.

The brothers grinned in that moment.

They had things all figured out for themselves.

They had the whole world ahead of them, if only they could put their socks on and run towards it.

But the shadow of their father still loomed large in the room; Jason would have been a fool not to think that that conversation was the first time Zak’s advice for sobriety had been listened to simply because every other one of the conversations had been with their father.

So really, that was what Jason learned that day—not that he should have been easier on himself, or that he had to keep his motivations in mind, or even that he had to reach out for help every once in a while.

In the end, the lesson learned was that the difference between life and death, as much as it pertains to addiction, was the willingness to actually get clean and take back one’s peace of mind.

He was sure that he had it.

_ He must have had it. _

And so his hopes were higher than usual.

The same could not be said for Ritchie.


	7. Stella, Mary, and the White Picket Fence

On one particular night, Jason stared at himself in the bathroom mirror.

He supposed he looked the same as he always had.

But it was nonetheless hard to believe that the man he saw staring back at him was really him.

He was the same man who had gotten busted in a bowling alley trying to dismantle a car radio to sell it for drug (and junk food) money. 

He was the same man who had started his life—or at least what he considered to be his life—crying in a laundry basket in Blackburn.

He was the same man who, just a few months ago, would roam the house alone in the dark, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at three, four, five in the morning when everyone else was asleep.

That man swallowed.

He was different now.

It may not have been too much of an accomplishment, Jason thought to himself, but then again, Zak had told him he had to have his moment of pride.

And he was proud.

A month and a half (give or take) had passed since the young man had watched an angel wake up on the wrong side of Berlin, only to find it was where he was meant to be all along.

And for the first time since then, on that night, Jason Starkey was able to say that he had joined old Cassiel. 

“Two weeks,” he muttered to the man staring back at him.

He had made it two weeks completely clean.

“That’s fourteen days…”

To say it had been easy would be—to put it mildly—an understatement.

It had been hell the whole way through.

But it had been done.

And that was all that the young man really cared about.

It had been done, and if he wanted to keep that semblance of a grin on his face, he had to continue to do it.

Hopefully, he thought to himself, since his symptoms were receding (though not entirely gone) that wouldn’t be as much of a challenge anymore.

Jason crossed his arms.

“You’ve done good, kid.”

An unexpected vibration in his back pocket, followed by the soft sound of a single chime, snapped the young man out of his moment of glory.

He leaned against the counter as he pulled the phone out, a bemused look on his face as he read the following:

**_Mary_ **

_ you wanna play uno _

Hell, Jason thought.

He couldn’t argue with that.

In hindsight, the young man should have expected it.

But it still seemed to catch him off guard when the door was opened, and inevitably, dogs relentlessly moved in.

They tackled him as he took a step through the foyer, jumping up on their hind legs and using their front ones to try and grab onto him.

Jason liked to think they were trying to shake his hand, howling and barking up a storm as they begged for just a moment of his attention.

The only thing they really ended up shaking, of course, was Jason.

His hosts tried furiously to pull the beasts away from him, calling the dogs’ names in panicked and somewhat disappointed voices as he trudged on through the foyer. 

“Timmy,” Linda scolded. “What do you say to to him?”

The dog didn’t respond to this, preferring to yip away as it circled Jason’s ankles.

Jason yipped back at it, imitating the little puff of rage as he growled.

And if he thought he was in trouble with the animals before, that really set things off.

The larger dog, a sheepdog named Charlie, started howling like there was no tomorrow, demanding, in his gruff old voice, where that third dog was.

Linda’s eyes bulged out of her skull as the dogs zipped through the front entrance, circling the young man and each other as they shouted.

But Jason only felt a little bad.

“Jesus Christ,” Mary swore from behind the hallway. “Are you trying to get them to kill you?”

The young man laughed. “If they don’t do it, then one of you sore losers will.”

His friend scoffed.

But their conversation was dulled by the incessant screeching that arises like water from a geyser out of a purse-sized dog’s mouth.

Jason yipped at it again for good measure as he stepped into the kitchen.

There, he saw, was the set-up: a table spread neatly with glasses of water, pop, bowls of popcorn and fruit, and of course, the all-important attraction, the centerpiece of it all was that little red pack of cards blaring the name  _ Uno  _ on the front.

He could only imagine where everything would be by the end of the night. 

“I’m touched,” he sighed, drawing his hand to his heart before dunking it into the popcorn. “You’ve got this whole place lined up for me and everything.”

“It’s family game night,” Stella said dryly, not looking up from her phone. “Except half the family didn’t wanna play.”

“So you invited me?”

Mary shrugged. “You’re close enough. Besides, the last time I asked James to play with us he didn’t talk to me for three days.”

She tilted her head.

“Of course, he also got grounded for three days for bein’ a bad sport… but that’s another story.”

Jason couldn’t help but laugh as a quick but unmistakably defensive, “Don’t tell him that!” rang out from somewhere on the stairs.

“Damn…” he shook his head. “Anyone ever tell you you could all be in some kinda stock image? With the white picket fence and the dogs and all that?”

“No,” Stella said, coyly. “But I have been told I could be a model.”

Mary scoffed. “By who? Mum?”

“As a matter of fact, it was Grandpa Jim. So ha-ha.”

“I think that just makes it worse,” Jason muttered, taking his seat. 

Mary nodded. “Totally.”

A bit of a silence found its way between the three, and it was at that point that Jason opened his mouth to ask whether the game should begin.

But before he got the chance, a previously unseen man on the sofa scolded, “Mary, why don’t you ask him if he’d like anythin’ to drink? He’s a guest.”

The girl wasted no time in saying, “Hey, Jason, you want a bottle o’ Vodka?”

Paul was flabbergasted. “Mary Anna McCartney!” he gasped.

Jason cackled. “Hell yeah, pull up the shot glasses!”

“No,” the girl sighed. “But really. We’ve got water, pop, some oat milk… if you’re into that…”

“How the hell do you milk an oat?”

“Beats me. Maybe you should try some and find out.”

The young man shrugged. “I might as well.”

After a tall glass of oat milk had been acquired, and a review of the beverage had been properly given (Jason found he didn’t have any strong feelings on the concoction) the younger McCartney girl turned to her father.

“Are you gonna join?” she asked.

The three at the table all looked to the man.

But Paul only shook his head, saying, “You three have your fun. I won’t impede, so long as you all stay civil.”

“Who’s talkin’ about staying civil  _ now _ ?” Stella whined. “Remember Monopoly?”

Her father laughed dismissively. “Your mother was cheating. I was well within my right to complain.”

Mary shot Jason a glance.

Just as the young man raised his eyebrows, she explained, “He was more than complaining.”

But Paul interrupted their conversation.

“Maybe I was,” he stated. “Maybe I was complaining rather loudly. But Linda was still stuffing bills in her sleeve.”

“Yeah,” Stella said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “ _ As a joke _ .”

Jason smirked. “Maybe she could use all the bills she got to pay the divorce attorney...”

Hearing this, Mary burst out laughing, her eyes darting back and forth between her father and the young man as she covered her mouth, grinning and giggling like a schoolgirl.

Stella, however, agreed with Jason, adding, “No doubt about it! She so could!”

Paul only chuckled.

“Dear God,” he sighed, turning to the young man. “I’ll have to keep you around as mine…”

Jason smiled, thriving off of the attention.

“You just might—so long as you don’t mind payin’ me enough to get me outta my dad’s shop.”

“You don’t like it?” Paul asked, well-meaning.

Jason’s smile began to fade. “Well… I don’t know. ‘S not the worst place to be, but…”

“You’d rather have another job, yeah?”

“Another  _ boss  _ is more like it,” the young man scoffed. “If you thought havin’ him around for dinner was bad, you should try havin’ him breathing down your neck twenty-four seven.”

Paul hummed, understanding. “Oh, he’s more than welcome around here. But I’m sure it does get grating, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah, like you wouldn’t believe. I mean, how’d you feel if your dad was barkin’ orders at you drunk off his tits?”

Stella stifled a laugh.

And though he appreciated the gesture, it was clear that Jason wasn’t joking.

Paul couldn’t seem to think of a response much better than, “Oh… we don’t use that kind of language around here, I’m afraid…”

Jason apologized, and seeing as the man was sympathetic, Paul was quick to forgive him.

But this understandably led to a certain unresolved tension in the room. It was an awkwardness caused by the hosts’ perception of Ritchie and his actions in comparison to Jason’s lived experience of said actions.

There was no way, Jason thought, that the McCartneys could have known the full extent of the man’s alcoholism on his shop and family. And so he shouldn’t have been so irritated by their lack of knowledge.

But there was the caveat—there was no way they  _ couldn’t  _ have known, either.

It had been in their house, after all, that Ritchie had caused that ruckus over biscuit cake or-whatever-the-fuck-it-was.

And it had been on that night, in the living room right beside that table Jason was sitting at, that he had finally snapped and ended up venting to the girls about the man’s true nature.

It hadn’t been a very long conversation, granted. 

But he had said what he needed to.

And it had been clear enough that both Stella and Mary understood the words he said.

So there had to have been some sort of cognitive dissonance there, especially when it came to Paul.

He had seen the man’s temper flare plenty of times—he must have. 

He had probably seen Ritchie drunk more than he had seen him sober.

As Stella shuffled the cards to the best of her nonexistent ability, Jason swallowed.

There was the problem, he thought. 

There were too many people out there with the same mindset as George. There were too many people out there who asked questions about Ritchie and the shop and how Jason felt about it all, and then didn’t make a peep once he had told them the truth.

To a certain extent, the young man understood that.

There was nothing that they really  _ could  _ say. 

It wasn’t like they could just knock Ritchie upside the head, have him pass out, and when he woke up, convince him to stop drinking and get his act together.

But at the same time, Jason thought, they didn’t have to ignore the problem altogether.

More than anything, the young man just wanted someone to look him in the eyes and acknowledge for the first time that, yes, his family was batshit insane.

Let’s put it like this:

When you live in a broken house with people brainwashed enough to believe it’s still standing fully upright, you tend to go out of your way to hear someone confirm to you that it’s nothing but rubble.

In any case, that was the end of the discussion on the misery of a man known as Richard Starkey—at least for that time.

There were other things to do, other thoughts to think.

Namely, there were seven brightly-colored cards in Jason’s hand, and the goal of the evening’s conquest was to lower that number down to one.

It was a worthy enough quest, challenging as it sometimes could be.

And although it was rare that the young man actually won a game, he nevertheless enjoyed himself sitting at that table, scooping comically large amounts of popcorn in his mouth and screeching like a pterodactyl whenever the dreaded ‘take four’ card found its way to him.

It was a nice enough treat for him to be able to divert some of his attention away from the unrelenting pursuit of sobriety and use it instead to have a good time.

For what felt like the first time in his entire life, Jason was able to just let himself be, wholly unbothered by thoughts of his father and family and crumbling house around them.

At least for a little while.

Just after the start of the third game—in which the young man had been dealt a rather beneficial hand—the increasingly driven competitors were interrupted by the dreadfully familiar sound of Stella and Mary’s kid brother. 

James was, in Jason’s eyes, a good step above that bozo Sean Lennon, though as one of Dhani’s friends, he wasn’t completely off the hook.

James was unassuming. He was carefree. He was docile.

Even in his position, being one year older than the youngest Starkey, he never let the power get to his head and declare himself the leader of the two (or three, since Sean had come into the picture.)

And beyond any of that, he was a genuinely nice boy—the type of kid that old ladies pinched the cheeks of as they helped them carry their groceries home. He was without a doubt a parent-approved friend. 

There was a catch to all of this, of course. There always was when it came to Dhani’s friends.

But it was a catch that could be molded for purposes of older-brother meddling and shenanigans.

The catch was that James was not at all self-aware, likely on account of being eight-going-on-eight-and-a-half.

He was very much still a child, babbling nonsensical and ultimately unnecessary things about lizards and cooties and anything else he took an interest in to just about anybody who would listen.

And at his age, he wasn’t able to realize just how strange some of the things he said and did sounded to other people.

It made an excellent pastime for his sisters and their friends, so long as they kept the laughter away from the sensitive little thing.

So, as always, when he came downstairs to find cards on the table and Jason in his chair, he asked, “Can I play?”

Jason turned to Mary.

“I don’t know…” he said. “We’ve already started.”

The boy frowned. “You can’t be that far.”

“You can join in the next round,” Mary decided. “But only if you promise to be a good sport about it.”

“I promise,” James nodded. 

His sister raised an eyebrow. 

“Cross your heart and hope to die?”

The boy drew an  _ x  _ in the center of his chest. “Stick a needle in my eye.”

Mary shrugged, cracking her neck as she returned to the cards in her hand. 

“Alrighty, then. You sit tight and watch the pros for a minute.”

Stella stifled a laugh. “The day Jason Starkey is a professional at anything is the day I die.”

“Yeah,” Jason scoffed, unnerved as he watched the siblings interact. “You and me both.”

And for a while, nothing more was said.

James stood statue-still behind the table, uncomfortably close to Jason as he inspected everyone’s cards.

“I know who’s going to win,” he said after a while, a confident grin on his face.

“Well then, don’t spoil it for us,” Mary warned.

The boy stuck his head in between his sister and Jason, still smiling.

“You don’t want me to tell you?”

“No,” Jason hissed.

James turned directly to the young man.

“You don’t even want a little hint?”

The older man snapped his body away from the boy. 

“Not even a little one,” he said, solemn. “That’s cheating, you know.”

James seemed confused. “Well, I wouldn’t call it cheating… I’m not playing, so it doesn’t really count.”

Jason opened his mouth to try and refute the point, already agitated by the prospects of playing even one round of the game with someone so… how shall we put it… lacking in the mental capacity and common sense required to properly enjoy a card game without pissing off the other players.

But before he had the chance to, Stella spoke up.

“James,” she said. “If you know who the winner is, why don’t you tell us what room they’re sitting in.”

The boy’s face contorted, and in doing so, Jason couldn’t help but think to himself that he looked a little like a very confused baby cow.

“What?” James asked. “You already know where they are, you’re all in the same room!”

“Come on,” Stella insisted, fanning herself with her cards as she leaned back dramatically in her chair. “The suspense is just  _ killing me _ .”

Mary laughed as she laid down her card. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of blues, now, haven’t you, Stella?”

The girl shot upright.

“And you’ve got a lot of nerve, from the looks of it.”

Her sister only chuckled.

“Either way, James. You don’t want poor Stella to die.”

“Well—” the boy struggled to collect his thoughts. “Of course not, but—”

“Tell us, James,” Mary insisted. “What room are they in?”

Jason rolled his eyes.

It was going to be a long night, he couldn’t help but think.

There was a part of him eager just to tear his focus from the situation, to tune out the boy’s whining and wait for him to leave the three of them alone.

But for some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to do it.

James struggled to answer the question. “I… That doesn’t make any sense, though!”

Stella, ever the actress, drew her hand to her forehead and shut her eyes.

“Oh Lord,” she sighed, feigning helplessness. “I can feel my heart slowing down now.”

“Come on, kid,” Mary laughed. “Your time’s running out…”

James squinted, carefully inspecting his dying sister.

“I don’t think you’re really sick,” he said after a moment. “I think you’re just tryin’ to play a joke on me…”

“Oh,” Stella moaned. “But I am! Feel my hand if you don’t believe me—it’s freezing cold.”

Wiggling her fingers, if only to add to the boy’s sheer disbelieving terror, the girl brought her free hand up to her brother’s face.

He cautiously took hold of her thumb, and in doing so, his eyes went wide.

Jason had to admit—that was a sight to behold.

“Oh my God,” James gasped, unaware of the young man snickering beside him. “You really  _ are  _ cold!”

Stella drew her hand to her heart.

“I am…Oh, I am… and the only cure is for you to tell me what room the winner of the game is in!”

James began to panic. “Um… um…”

All of a sudden, the girl opened her eyes. 

“The light,” she said. “I can see… the light…”

“Stella!” her brother shouted. “Stella, no, don’t go into it!”

“Stella,” Paul sighed from the other room, sounding nothing short of totally defeated. “Please don’t go into the light.”

“I have no other… choice… unless James tells us… where the winner is.”

“But didn’t you just say that would be cheating?!”

“That was Jason… actually.”

The boy turned wildly to Jason, his eyes pleading for some sort of solution to the problem at hand.

“God,” Jason said, drawing back, his inexplicable sense of discomfort returning. “Don’t look at me—I don’t know.”

James fidgeted for a moment, his fingers curling and his eyes darting wildly as Stella cried out in self-pity across from him.

“Woe is me,” she lamented. “Dying here playing Uno with Jason Starkey!”

Jason couldn’t have cared less. “Maybe I’ll get the life insurance…”

Finally, about ready to burst at the seams with pressure, James shouted out, “The winner is sitting at the kitchen table!”

The whole room was quiet for a single second.

Mary grinned.

Jason drew away from the boy, annoyed by the sheer volume of his voice.

And Stella, slower than anything previously known to exist, but more suddenly than the big bang, popped a single one of her eyes wide open.

The other followed, blinking as the girl sat up.

“Well, then,” she announced daintily, her hands in her lap as she sat herself up. “I suppose I’ll live to see another day after all.”

James laughed.

In response to this, Mary reached her hand back and ruffled his hair.

The boy squinted and drew himself away, but Jason was not as fortunate.

Put simply, the young man didn’t have the luxury of removing himself from the scene.

It wasn’t that he had lost his appetite for obliterating his friends in a round of Uno—that was always there. 

Instead, Jason couldn’t help but sense a nagging feeling in the back of his mind, a sort of pulling, if you will, that there was something amiss at that table.

There was something he was supposed to notice.

But he wasn’t able to do that, as he would soon find out, until that rudely interrupted round had ended.

It was a fairly nonchalant game, passing quicker than Jason had failed algebra in his seventh year. There were no surprises, no last-minute draw-fours, and, to be honest, there was little fanfare as the young man muttered his very first, “Uno.”

This was nothing special to Mary, Stella, or Jason.

But to James, of course, it was a great benefit.

With the end of the world’s dullest round of Uno, a new one was set to begin with the boy as a new-coming fourth competitor. The table was set, the seat had been taken, the popcorn had been grabbed, and there was only one thing left to do before he was finally allowed to play:

They had to actually distribute the cards.

It was Stella’s job again, lousy as her shuffling skills were.

So there it was—Stella was fiddling with the cards, Mary was staring at her phone, James was petting the ankle-biter that had found its way beneath the table, and Jason was left in the middle of it all with the same sense he had come to know and love, the same sense he had first experienced watching dead babies and men falling from roofs in  _ Wings of Desire _ , the sense that something big was right in front of his face, and if only he noticed it, it would do him a lot of good.

He wasn’t sure whether it was God pulling his leg, or some stroke of fate leading him on, or what.

But he  _ really  _ wasn’t sure what to do about it.

It was like an itch he couldn’t scratch—he knew he had to keep his eyes peeled for whatever it was that was about to come to him, but that was all he could do.

He just had to sit and wait for fate to find him.

Until he got an idea.

On his right side, a bell chimed, and Mary’s eyes drew up towards the top of her phone screen.

**_Jason Starkey_ **

_ has he got to play _

The young woman squinted her eyes as she responded.

**_Mary_ **

_ Who? _

_ James? _ __   
  


**_Jason Starkey_ **

_ no you bozo the president of Uzbekistan _

**_Mary_ **

_ … _

**_Jason Starkey_ **

_ yes James _

_ damn _

**_Mary_ **

_ He promised he’d be a good sport about it _

**_Jason Starkey_ **

_ yeah well he’s like _

_ four years old _

**_Mary_ **

_ :(((( _

_ What have you got against him??? _

_ He’s literally so pure??? _

**_Jason Starkey_ **

_ nothing _

_ i think he’s an alright enough kid _

_ but like _

_ i don’t get why he’s gotta be h _

The sound of Stella’s voice, dull and unimpressed, snapped the two out of their trance.

“Kids these days,” she scoffed. “Always on their blasted phones…”

Mary rolled her eyes. “Yeah, Stella, you included.”

“Myself included,” the girl agreed. “Now for the love of God, let’s start the game! Otherwise I’ll pack James up and leave you two lovebirds on your honeymoon.”

James laughed.

“Aw,” Jason scolded. “Where the hell did you get  _ that  _ idea?!”

The young man didn’t care hearing a quick, “Language, Jason!” from the other room.

“Well,” Stella laughed. “I don’t know… but I did get your attention, now, didn’t I?”

Jason glared at her.

He couldn’t argue with that.

A tap on the young man’s shoulder led him to turn around.

James swung his legs beneath the table as he asked, “Jason, will you tell Dhani I said hi when you get home?”

Jason shrugged. “Don’t see why not.”

“Alright. Thank you.”

James returned to staring at his cards.

That seemed to be the end of that.

“Jesus Christ,” Jason sighed. “You guys are weird…”

The boy puckered his lips like he had been sucking on a lemon. 

“Weird?” he asked. “What’s weird about telling Dhani I say hi?”

“Well, it’s weird when you get my attention just to tell me  _ that _ …” He turned to Stella. “Hell, for that matter, it’s weird to get my attention by betrothin’ me to your sister, too!”

Mary laughed. “Well, I’ll agree with you there. Stella lost her mind a  _ long  _ time ago.”

“Yeah,” James added. “She was prob’ly dropped on her head.”

Stella only glared at the boy, her face taut as a rope.

“I’ll drop  _ you  _ on your head…”

Mary shrugged. “Not if I drop you both first.”

“And…” Jason’s face contorted, a smile crossing his cheeks in pure, unabashed confusion. “Somehow, I’m the one that’s weird for asking what’s wrong with you guys? When you’re havin’ a Mexican standoff at the edge of a cliff?”

Mary punched the young man playfully on the arm. 

“Aw, lighten up, you oaf!” she said. “Come on, I’ve heard you say worse to Dhani!”

Jason raised his eyebrows. “Maybe I have… but this is different.”

“Different like how?” James asked, tilting his head.

“I… God, I don’t know! You guys are like… livin’ on the cover of some sort of family magazine or something. Tell you what it is, you’re so  _ white-picket-fence-and-two-point-five-kids-plus-a-dog  _ that it’s starting to creep me out.”

James, in his infinitely lacking wisdom, did not seem to understand this idea.

“How the heck do you have point five of a kid?” he asked, panicked.

His concerns fell on deaf ears.

Mary’s face fell halfway between a frown and a furrow, the barest hint of a smile visible beneath her eyes as she responded, “Jason… sometimes I don’t know what in God’s name you’re on…”

The young man’s eyes bulged.

In what world but his own, he wondered, would the stars align for such an ironic comment to be made?

“I’m serious!” he said, laughing through his words. “You guys are buggin’ me out!”

“Guys?” James called, frantic. “Guys, you still haven’t said how—”

Stella laughed.

“If there’s anything that’s bugging  _ me  _ out, then it’s your hair…”

“Ha-ha,” Jason rolled his eyes. “Very funny. But for your information, I think I look great.”

By this point, James was beside himself.

“Would the point fifth kid be the one still in its mum?” be asked. “Or would it be a baby? ‘Cos a baby’s not the same thing as an actual  _ kid  _ last time I checked.”

Mary laughed. “Poor thing—it’s just a saying. Nothin’ to get so worried about.”

Her brother squinted as he mumbled, “It had better be…”

“Either way,” the young woman continued. “I say we just rule Jason off his rocker and move on. I wanna be able to savor the look on your faces when I pound you all into the ground.”

James raised his eyebrows.

“Figuratively, of course.”

“Agreed,” Stella sighed.

Jason shook his head, disappointed he hadn’t been able to get anywhere with his premonition, but understanding that such a thing would never be able to make sense to anyone other than him.

In the end, he resolved that it was better to do nothing at all about his sixth sense, to keep it in his head, in the only place it made any sense, and move on with both his life and the card game before him.

There were a few rounds played, each with a separate winner, but more interesting than any of these details were the topics of conversation that came up.

School was the obvious choice—Jason was the only person at the table no longer enrolled in that seven-to-three hell, after all, and on top of that, the social element of education just seemed to matter more to younger children.

So there were a great many laughs exchanged about that. 

Grades, flunking, who did what with whom, immortal and immortally frustrating teachers… all of it was fair game for the four at the table.

And when they couldn’t think of anything else to say about that, Stella decided to divulge into the drama that seemed to constantly circle her group of friends.

Jason didn’t care so much to hear her call everyone under the sun (and probably more) a clown, or an old hag, or a wannabe, but he had to admit that it did make good conversation.

It was the same factor that made reality TV so appealing, he supposed.

In any case, after a while, the conversations had strayed so far from whatever God had intended them to be that the four of them just put the cards away, refilled their snacks, and kept on talking.

The only problem was that conversation, no matter what the topic, has a limited lifespan.

After a while, it became clear to everyone at the table that the night was winding down.

Mary stared off into space.

Stella returned to her phone (likely in order to call even more people clowns.)

And Jason simply rested his head on the table, about ready to fall asleep after a long night of embarrassing himself and pretending to be the hotshot he thought he was.

Inexplicably, this was when James finally decided to ask:

“How is Dhani, anyways?”

Jason stared up at the boy, his eyes dull as a rock.

“Excuse me?”

“Dhani,” James repeated. “Your little brother. Don’t you know him?”

“Of course I know him,” Jason scoffed. “Lived with the kid since he was one month old.”

“Then do you know how he is? I haven’t seen him in a while.”

Jason frowned. “You haven’t?”

“Well,” the boy staggered. “I see him at the bus stop in the morning, and then again in the afternoon… and then sometimes he calls me after dinner… but other than that, no. Is he sick?”

“Jesus Christ… you’re worried about  _ that _ ? You’d think the two of you were attached at the hip or something…”

“Could you just answer the question?” James whined. “I haven’t got all night, you know.”

“Fine, fine. He’s not sick, if that’s what you’re all up in arms about. I saw him this morning—he was downin’ porridge like his life depended on it.”

“But is he doing alright?”

Jason blinked. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know… is he sad? Is he mad at me? Did I do somethin’ to upset him?”

Mary turned around with the sort of doe eyes she reserved especially for comforting her brother.

“Aw,” she said. “Come on, now. I’m sure it wasn’t anything you did.”

“Unless it was,” James pointed out. “Was it, Jason? Was it something I said?”

The young man swallowed, a bitter taste in his mouth as a silent fear crept into his skin.

“You didn’t do jack, kid. Look—if it makes you feel better, I’ll tell him to call you, and then you can talk to him…”

He shook his head, his mind growing foggy with thoughts he had never had before.

“But don’t you go around askin’ me how he is, ‘cause I don’t know. Alright?”

No one else at the table seemed to notice the strange wave washing over Jason.

James, for one, simply nodded his head and agreed, “Alright.”

The night didn’t end on a low note, but all that said, it didn’t end on a high note, either.

It ended with little fanfare, with a simple stretch and a simpler suggestion that Jason had better get home before Paul and Linda had to take him in as their own. 

Goodbyes were said, of course.

And the dogs tried a second time to kill the young man as he made his way out the door.

But there wasn’t nearly as much calamity or excitement as there had been when he first stepped into the house.

He didn’t think much of it on his way home.

He was too busy trying to figure out what in God’s name had him so shaken up all of a sudden.

Dhani wasn’t talking to James as much, he thought—though by  _ not as much  _ the boy meant  _ not seventeen times a day _ .

There had to be some sort of reason for it. Even if it was just that the two were getting older, and as a result, growing more distant.

Jason didn’t want to think that something was wrong with his brother, that something had been nagging on him to the point of tangible change in his behavior.

And if it had been any other kid, then this concern could be brushed off immediately—no normal kid, raised by normal people in a normal family, at seven years old, would have to go through that sort of thing so young.

But there was the problem.

There wasn’t anything normal about the Starkeys—not one little bit.

God, Jason thought, how hadn’t he seen it before?

He had spent so much time worrying about the boy, dreading the consequences he knew would befall Dhani if their parents kept up with their bullshit… but never in his life had Jason tried to do anything to stop them.

The young man tried his hardest to shake off the shame, walking back into that house.

With his withdrawals—at least at that time—behind him, and his day in court still before him, there was no better time than the present to take action.

Maybe George and Ritchie couldn’t keep their family together, he thought.

But Jason?

The least he could do was try.


	8. The Changing Type

Call him a chicken if you want, but after five days, Jason still hadn’t found it in him to try and open up a dialogue with Dhani.

There were just too many things in the way—between the shop, home, school, James, and Sean, it seemed every time the young man tried to talk to his brother, something else came up.

Not only that, but he figured that if he ever wanted to do it, he had to do it right. This would require that Jason get his own emotions in check first.

Now, thank his lucky star, he hadn’t relapsed, so for the time being, he wasn’t so depressed he couldn’t leave his room.

But in sobriety, Jason found himself to be a rather spiteful sort of man, afflicted with numerous anger issues that he had—through some unfortunate miracle—inherited from his father.

If he wasn’t too scared to talk to Dhani, then he was too angry.

Of course, the fact that he couldn’t seem to do it only frustrated him more.

It was completely illogical.

It was an absolute nightmare.

And it was the most grating thing on planet Earth.

But be what it may, it was Jason’s life.

And hey—if it made him feel any better, fate was watching out for him.

It always seemed to.

See, while lounging around in his room one night scrolling endlessly through those corners of the internet that only happen to make themselves known at such times, the young man heard a quiet click and looked up to see his brother’s face poking through the small opening in the door.

“Jason?” Dhani asked quietly.

The young man set his phone down. “Yeah?"

“Can…” his brother glanced at the floor. “Can I come in?”

“Um… sure.”

The door opened fully, and as the boy stepped inside, Jason shifted around on his mattress.

“Make yourself at home,” he said.

Dhani frowned. “This  _ is  _ my home…”

“Oh, you know what I mean,” Jason sighed. “Just take a seat anywhere and don’t go lookin’ for things you’re not supposed to find.”

“Like what?”

Jason sneered. “Why would I tell you about what I don’t want you to look for? I’d just be setting up for you to find ‘em.”

The boy sat criss-cross on the floor, still donning his pajamas, and it was only then that his brother noticed the worn orange head of a stuffed tiger in Dhani’s lap.

“You brought Ukulele,” the young man said casually. 

His brother drew the animal close to his chest, his arms squeezing its torso as he whined, “Don’t call him that! It’s just Lele.”

“Well, I was the one that got him first,” Jason laughed. “I think I’ve got the right to name him.”

“ _ Well _ , he hates when you call him that. And I know so because he just told me.”

“Alright, alright,” the young man conceded, throwing his hands in the air for dramatic effect. “I’m sorry, Lele.”

Dhani held the stuffed animal up to his ear. 

“Lele says he forgives you,” he announced.

Jason grinned, more moved by the sight than he would ever dare admit.

But with the apology accepted by the inanimate tiger, a great silence took hold of the room, and neither brother seemed to know what to say next. 

The whole situation just seemed so strange to Jason—for the first (and likely only) time ever, Dhani had come into the room at a good time.

For once, Jason actually  _ wanted  _ to talk to him. 

The opportunity was right there in front of him; it was as if fate, or an angel, or God Himself had pushed the boy into his bedroom, reminding him that it was now or never, that he had no choice but to take his chance.

The young man drew a breath in.

“So,” he sighed, trying his best not to force the conversation. “What brings you here, anyways?”

Dhani shrugged, wringing his hands. “Well… I’m technically supposed to be in bed…”

Jason checked his phone for the time.

It was two hours since the boy’s usual bedtime.

“But I couldn’t sleep,” Dhani went on. “So—and don’t tell Dad and Baba, by the way—”

“My lips are sealed.”

The boy raised his eyebrows. “Really sealed?”

“Sealed as can be.”

“With superglue?”

Jason chuckled. “Aw, you wish.”

Dhani gave a shy, uncertain smile. 

“Anyways,” the older man sighed. “You go on—you couldn’t sleep.”

“Oh, right… well… if you promise not to tell anyone, then I turned on the little candle I got for Diwali last year, and I started reading.”

“Reading what?”

The boy’s face soured. “It’s none of your business.”

Jason cocked an eyebrow. “Oh, I see. You get yourself into somethin’ you shouldn’t be looking at, Dhani?”

“No!” he cried. “No, come on! I got it from school.”

Recognizing that the boy was growing genuinely angry—never the goal of Jason’s meddling—the young man let it go.

“Okay,” he sighed. “I get it. Now go on.”

“Fine,” Dhani huffed. “I was reading, but then I finished the book, but I still can’t sleep, and I can’t tell Baba ‘cos then he’ll know what I was doing, but I miss him, and I want to talk to him, but I can’t—”

“Alright, well—”

“And you’re not him,” the boy went on, growing frustrated. “And he’s busy, and I can’t sleep…”

“Hold on, now,” Jason warned. “What’s he so busy doing? It’s ten o’clock at night.”

Dhani looked up. “You don’t know?”

The young man sat up, resting his elbows on his knees as his legs hung off the edge of the bed.

“I guess I don’t,” he said. “Enlighten me.”

“He just…” Dhani struggled to get the words out. “Jason, do you swear on your life you won’t tell him I said this?”

The older man nodded, serious. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Stick a —”

“Stick a needle in my eye. Now tell me—what’s Baba been up to?”

Dhani drew a deep breath in, his hands wringing like it was the end of the world.

“Well—” he stammered. “Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I go out into the hall, or on the stairs, or something… and I pretend I’m not there and I listen to him…”

Jason felt a plume of guilt rise in his throat as the boy spoke, hot and thick like bitter molasses.

Dhani swallowed, though it was obvious to his brother he was only trying to keep himself from breaking down.

“And—and all he ever does is fight with Dad… and if Dad’s not home, then he just sits there and doesn’t do anything. He just—” The boy sniffled. “He looks so sad!”

Jason’s face fell.

It was hell seeing Dhani so upset.

If he had any sense at all, Jason would march downstairs and slap both his fathers clear across the face.

It was them that he blamed for the boy’s unhappiness.

It was them he blamed for his own.

He wanted to scream until his lungs gave out, asking the two of them how in the hell they had ever been allowed to adopt and screw up one child—let alone  _ four _ .

It was them that tore their family apart, he thought.

They deserved to know that.

But that couldn’t be his priority, a voice in Jason’s head reminded. At that moment, his priority was to try and take care of Dhani—he would deal with his fathers later on.

Without saying anything, Jason hoisted himself further to the left on the bed and pat his mattress, motioning for his brother to join him.

Dhani was skeptical at first, clutching onto (Uku)Lele as his eyes locked onto Jason’s.

“You can come on if you want,” the older man said, serious. “I don’t bite.”

“I know  _ that _ …” Dhani groaned.

“Alright, well, it’s up to you. If you wanna come on, I’ll let ye, and if you just wa—”

Before Jason could finish his sentence, the boy had scrambled onto the bed with him, and was staring down at the ground with his fingers coiled tightly around the edge of the mattress.

The older man looked at him for a moment in shock.

He hadn’t ever seen a kid that young look so stressed.

More importantly, he thought, he hadn’t ever seen Dhani get like that. 

It only compounded Jason’s own anxiety; how in the hell was he supposed to know how to help? The only times he ever talked to his brother were to goof around with him and his friends.

Dhani’s lips shook.

Though the boy tried as hard as he could to hide it, Jason couldn’t help but overhear the soft cry that spilled out of his brother’s mouth.

With only a moment’s hesitation, he lifted his arm up and placed a hand gently against Dhani’s back. 

It was at that point that the floodgates opened.

Dhani began to cry, unable to hold it back any longer, and as soon as he felt Jason’s touch, it became clear that he was desperate for more.

He clung onto his brother’s arm for dear life, pressing his face into the crook of Jason’s elbow if only to muffle the sound of his sobs.

Jason responded the way any brother with half a brain would. He reached out his other arm, and as tight as he could, he wrapped them both around the boy’s torso, snaking his right hand up to cradle Dhani’s head.

It was strange—Jason had never been very much of the touchy-feely type, not even when the boy was so little he couldn’t speak.

Most of the time it was left up to Zak and Lee to coddle their baby brother.

But there was something about that moment that demanded no other action.

Jason supposed it was the only way he knew how to help.

“It’s alright, love,” he cooed. “You’re okay—don’t suffocate yourself, now.”

Dhani sniffled, and between sobs and Jason’s (now very dirty) shirtsleeves asked, “What the heck does that mean?”

Jason rubbed the boy’s back, taking care to lift Dhani’s head onto his shoulder and keep him from passing out.

“Just make sure you keep breathing, alright?”

“I’m not gonna  _ stop _ ,” Dhani whined. “That’d make me  _ dead _ !”

“Exactly,” the older man said. “So that’s why you’ve gotta keep doing it, okay?”

The only response his brother gave him was to groan into his collarbone, the boy’s shoulders shaking as he cried.

“Dhani,” Jason sighed. “Come on, now, take a look at me. It’ll be easier to talk if you look at me.”

A muffled mess of brown-but-could-be-black-if-you-saw-it-in-the-right-light hair replied, “I don’t wanna!”

“Then… you don’t have to. Just don’t get mad at me if I can’t understand what you’re sayin’, alright?”

“Fine.”

Jason let out a breath. “Fine, indeed.”

It was hard to know what to say next; for a long time, Dhani just sat and cried in Jason’s arms.

It was difficult for the young man to watch—Good God, it was awful!

But he knew it was necessary.

If Dhani went on in the state he was in, breaking down to no one but himself and keeping everything inside of him, he would turn into a living powder keg.

Jason knew that from experience.

That wasn’t any way to live, Jason thought, chugging along with gunpowder in your stomach until one day, under pressure so great it didn’t seem real, you did something crazy and burst into flames.

He wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy.

So sad as it was to see, and as much as it clawed at the young man’s heart, Jason made no attempt to calm his brother down.

Dhani needed to get everything out first.

Let a little gunpowder spill.

Finally, gasping for air between sobs, the boy asked, “What did I  _ do _ ?”

Jason swallowed. “What do you mean, love?”

“Wha—” Dhani sniffled. “Baba… what did I do to make him sad?”

“Oh,” Jason chided. “Oh no, no, no, come here…”

With more resolve than he ever thought himself to have, Jason pulled himself away from his brother and grabbed the boy by the shoulders.

He tilted Dhani’s chin up with one hand, keeping it there so his head didn’t droop back down again. With the other, Jason tried his hardest to wipe the tears away.

For a moment, the young man just stared at the boy.

It was like he was looking at Dhani for the very first time again, studying his face like it was the last time he would ever see it.

It was a surreal experience, to say the least.

His eyes were wide—two wet masses of white and brown and black that led straight down, like a spiral staircase, to the boy’s soul.

And above them stood two thick brown eyebrows, knit in the center as they lay crippled above Dhani’s eyelashes, so close together that only a few hairs stood between them.

God, Jason thought, a deep cavity opening up somewhere in his stomach. Dhani looked so much like George…

But there were flashes of something else in that boy. There was something in his skin, something in his hair, something in the way he looked up at his brother that showed an entirely different person.

Whether it was his mother’s features shining through or just the attributes that made Dhani himself, Jason couldn’t tell.

But how awful was it, he thought, that the boy who was  _ supposed  _ to belong in that family, the one that required no explanation for his being there, the one that was always assumed to be George’s child without any questions or prodding, couldn’t bear to belong there at all?

Dhani didn’t deserve to be in that house, Jason thought.

He didn’t deserve to be around all these people that shouted and screamed and shoved all of it under the rug.

But he bore a curse that no one—not Jason, not George or Ritchie; not even Lee or Zak—would never be able to understand.

He wore his shame on his face.

“Listen to me,” Jason said after a while, holding onto his brother’s chin as he peered into his eyes. “There’s not a single thing you did to make anyone upset—do you understand that?”

“No!” Dhani protested. “No! I did! You don’t understand!”

“Dhani.”

The boy glared, unwilling to listen to reason in his overly emotional state. “I  _ had  _ to do something, Jason! I  _ had  _ to!”

Jason raised his voice just slightly. “ _ Dhani _ .”

This seemed to grab his brother’s attention, a flash of fear in his eyes as he turned to the young man.

“Look,” Jason sighed. “You have to listen to me—you didn’t do anything to make Dad or Baba or anyone else upset. They’re upset because they’ve got issues, and that ain’t any fault of yours.”

“Well,” Dhani stammered, his face flaming as he searched for an answer that didn’t exist. “Well, then what issues have they got? If it’s not me that’s makin’ them so upset, what is it?”

The older man shook his head.

Though he wanted to believe—he  _ needed  _ to believe that he was better than George, that he would answer his brother’s questions in plain English and not hums and half-truths, Jason found that when push came to shove, he didn’t want to be the one to explain to Dhani that their father was nothing short of an incompetent drunk with a penchant for punching the walls.

Frustrated by this nonanswer, the boy whined, “Why won’t you  _ tell me _ ?!”

Jason turned to him, opening his mouth to sigh, but was interrupted by a sound from downstairs.

“Oh,” Ritchie groaned, slurring his words. “For Christ’s sake, what’s wrong with you?”

Dhani flinched, clenching his fist at the noise.

George shot back with a decisive—and only slightly quieter: “Nothing. That’s what. I don’t know what kind of world you live in, but there’s not anything wrong with me asking you to help out a little around here. It’s your family, too, Rich.”   
The voices seemed to pipe down after that.

But Dhani sure didn’t.

He stared at the ground, his arms crossed as he gazed into the carpeting with hands tracing over his elbows.

He was totally silent.

He wasn’t angry anymore—at the very least, he didn’t seem like it.

Now, Jason noticed, he just looked scared.

The older man pitied him.

“Do you want to know what’s wrong with them?” Jason asked at last.

Dhani swallowed, and without speaking, gave a nod.

“You do?”

“I do.”

The older man drew in a deep breath.

Here goes nothing.

“Well,” Jason began, uncertain. “The thing is—Dad’s a little sick. He has been for a long time.”

Dhani furrowed his brow. “What has he got?”

“Not that type of sick. It’s not the sort of thing you can see on someone, like when you have a fever or a cough or something… he’s sick in his head.

“He’s just got a problem,” Jason said plainly. “He’s made some bad choices in the past and now he’s gotten sick because of them.”

The boy pursed his lips. “I don’t get it…”

“God,” his brother cursed. “I know you don’t; it’s hard to explain. But surely you’ve noticed it. I mean… you have, haven’t you? Our family don’t work like other people’s.”

Dhani shrugged. “I guess not.”

The boys sat limp on the mattress, staring at the edge where the wall met the floor.

“Let me ask you something,” Jason said after a while. “In school… they tell you about drugs and alcohol, don’t they?”

His brother’s face contorted, a very peculiar sort of frown finding its way onto his face.

“I mean… yeah? I don’t know…”

Jason drew a deep breath in, trying in vain to prepare himself for what he would have to say.

In a lower tone, he asked, “They ever tell you about how when you do ‘em, you want to keep doing ‘em again and again?”

“I—I don’t know.”

“Alright,” the older man sighed. “Well, then, I’ll tell you—sometimes, when people do drugs or drink a lot of alcohol, they get a real strong sense that they’ve got to do them again.”

He frowned. “It’s somethin’ in the brain, I’m pretty sure… you want to keep doing them because they feel good. If you’re sad, they make you happier. If you’re having a bad day, then they make you feel a little better.

“So, then—what happens to some people is that they just keep doing them and doing them all the time. They stop doing anything else, because nothing else feels as good as they do.

“In their own head, they think that they’re doing great. They get to feel happy all the time, you know?”

Dhani nodded, keen to listen.

“But that’s not really what’s happening. It’s a trick. They don’t feel good, because the whole rest of their lives is completely gone. If they keep livin’ it the way they used to, then they don’t feel as good.”

He shook his head. “So what they end up doing is… God. They just don’t stop. They  _ always  _ drink. They  _ always  _ do drugs.”

Jason’s face began to flush. 

The conversation was moving a bit too close to home.

“And—and when they try to stop, they can’t, because their bodies have gotten so used to bein’ high that they don’t know what to do when they’re not. They get sick. They feel awful.”

Dhani couldn’t help but interrupt. “So that’s what’s makin’ him feel sick, then?” he asked in what could barely be considered a whisper. “He… he can’t stop…”

Jason swallowed.

“No,” he said, palms growing sweaty. “No, it isn’t that.”

The boy looked confused.

“Dhani—” Jason staggered, turning to look his brother in the eyes. “Dad’s an alcoholic.”

The older man couldn’t bear the sight in front of him as the words left his mouth.

He had been expecting some sort of emotional meltdown from Dhani. He had been expecting him to shout or cry or scream.

But instead, the boy just sat there, his brow furrowed and his eyes glued to the ground.

His lips were slightly parted, opened like he had to say something, but couldn’t find the words.

Jason spoke slowly.

“Do you… know what that is?”

“I don’t.”

The older man nodded, understanding. 

“It’s someone who drinks too much alcohol.” he said. “Beer, wine, whiskey—that sort of thing. They drink so much of it that they can’t stop and they get sick, like I was saying.”

“So… Dad’s sick because he can’t stop, then,” Dhani interrupted. “So I was right.”

Jason began to grow frustrated. “No. No, you’re either sick because you’re an addict, or you’re sick because you’re tryin’ to  _ stop  _ being one. You’re sick either way, love, and God, I’m sorry to tell you, but Dad’s not tryin’ to stop drinking—not at all.”

He shook his head in a vain attempt to shake off his own anger. “He just keeps getting worse.”

Dhani’s face grew pale.

“Jason,” he panicked. “Is—is he gonna die?”

The older man wasn’t sure how to answer that. 

On the one hand, he didn’t want to lie to Dhani and say that no one had ever died because of their alcoholism.

But at the same time, Jason didn’t want to be the one to send his brother into a fit of panic.

“No,” he said after a while. “You haven’t got to worry about that. He might mess his body up some, drinkin’ like that, but the likelihood that he’d actually die is really small.”

Jason sighed, continuing, “The worst thing that could happen… sort of already has.”

Dhani was spiraling. 

“What do you mean by that?!” he cried, his pupils the size of sand grains as he dug his fingers into his arms. “What’s happened?”

Jason put an arm around him, trying as hard as he could to calm the boy.

“Hey,” he said. “Come on, now. All I meant is that his drinking is making him and Baba fight. It makes him mad. It makes him do stupid shit all the time and come home real late. For now, that’s sort of the worst it  _ can  _ do.

“I’m not sayin’ that’s any good,” he shrugged. “‘Cos believe me, I’m just as sick of it as you are. But… that’s the way it is right now.”

Dhani shook his head in disbelief. “No. No it’s not—it’s not that bad! He’s a good guy, Jason, he is!”

The older man frowned.

Though he would never say it to the boy, he begged to differ.

“He can be as good of a guy as he wants,” Jason grunted. “But it doesn’t change anything. He’s an alcoholic, he’s an addict, and he’s putin’ all of us in some real deep shit because of it. It doesn’t matter if he rescues kittens from burning buildings, for Christ’s sake. The only way any of that’s going to change is if he steps up and actually does something about it.”

“Then why doesn’t he?” Dhani sobbed. “Why—why don’t he just stop drinking?”

His brother clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth, growing increasingly frustrated.

It would have made sense, at that time, to clarify to the boy that the path to sobriety wasn’t clear nor straightforward, and that to realize there was an actual issue was not a simple task.

There was a part of Jason’s brain that knew this, that could relate his own struggles as an addict to his father’s.

But that part—if it existed at all—was not a large one.

And so the words that left the young man’s mouth were these:

“Because he’s an arse. That’s why. He’s just so deep into it all at this point that—truth be told—I don’t think anything’s ever gonna change him. Not if he loses the shop, not if Baba and all of us just stop talkin’ to him, not anything. It’d take a miracle… at least if you ask me.”

Dhani frowned. “But Jason, he’s gotta! He—how could he  _ want  _ to be sick the whole rest of his life? It doesn’t make any sense!”

“It doesn’t matter what he does or doesn’t want. The fact is that he wants to get drunk more.”

The boy pouted, an unmistakable devastation in his eyes, locked squarely on Jason’s as he asked, “So he cares about gettin’ drunk more than he cares about any of us?”

It was only out of pity that the older man responded:

“No.”

Jason shook his head, holding out his arms to scoop the boy up, pretending—or maybe wishing he could pretend—that Dhani was all of one month old again.

“No,” he repeated, sighing as he rubbed the boy’s back. “No, no, no, no…”

“You were the one that said it!” Dhani protested between cries.

Jason was at a loss for words.

“God,” he said. “God, I’m sorry… I’m no good at this... I shouldn’t have—”

He cut himself off.

He  _ should  _ have told the boy.

He  _ should  _ have done better than his fathers ever could.

Sure, maybe Jason wasn’t the right person for Dhani to be talking to. Maybe he couldn’t ever know how to explain things to the boy in a way that made sense.

He wondered for a moment why it had to be him and not George or Zak or Baba.

But if it wasn’t him, then it wouldn’t be anyone.

No one else had the guts.

“It’s a lot to take in,” the older man said after a pause. “And I know it probably doesn’t make much sense to you, bein’ a kid and all… but if you ask me, then you ought to know. 

“He’s your dad,” Jason nodded, sure of himself at last. “Just the same as he is mine. And if he’s got a problem, then you’ve got a right to know.”

Dhani wiped his eye from behind his brother’s shoulder, sniffling so as not to drip any more of his bodily fluids onto Jason’s jacket. 

“I kind of thought something was wrong,” he mumbled. “I kind of already knew.”

For the first time in a very long time, out of equal parts love and instinct, and much to his own confusion, Jason kissed his brother on the head, drawing in the scent of the boy’s shampoo.

“I figured as much.”

Dhani didn’t seem to hear him, going on, “Though I guess I don’t really know much more now.”

He sniffled.

“I don’t know about drinkin’ or drugs or alcoholics or anything…”

“Oh,” Jason sighed. “That’s alright. I did a shit job explainin’ things. Not that anyone expects you to get it. You’re only seven, after all.”

He pulled his brother slightly away from him and kept hold of his shoulders, looking deep into his eyes for a second time that night as he asked, “But you know what?”

“What?”

“Whatever you don’t know, you can ask me about. I don’t know a whole lotta things, but I do know some.”

“Yeah?”

Jason nodded. “For sure.”

There was an extended pause.

Finally, the words left Dhani’s lips.

And once they began, they couldn’t seem to stop.

“Was it something I did?”

“Love… he’s been like this since before you were even born.”

“Then did I make it worse? When I was born, I mean?”

Jason shook his head. “He was able to get better ‘cos of you, actually. You gave him a reason to do better…”

“Then do you think I could do it again?”

“It’s beyond any of us now, Dhani. Hell, it was beyond us before, too.” He clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth. “You made him want to change, sure. But you weren’t the one that made him change. That was all on him.”

“So how’s he ever gonna do it?”

Jason raised his eyebrows.

It could be argued that in the time between New Year’s Day, 2020—the night he had watched angels stand on Earth and in the sky—and that night he sat with Dhani on his bed, the young man had revealed himself to be less of a pessimist than he had originally thought he was.

Still, you can’t change a donkey to a unicorn.

A pessimist, no matter how much self-help they drag themselves through, is still a pessimist.

Jason never answered the boy’s question.

He pretended not to hear it, if only to spare Dhani’s feelings.

But if he did have to answer, if a gun was being held to his head, then what the young man would have said was simple:

Ritchie wasn’t going to change.

He just wasn’t the changing type. 


	9. If You Find Yourself In a Hole

The day at Starkey Music and Records had started off normal enough.

If you ignored the half-to-three-quarters drunk manager, the smell of cigarette smoke in the workshop, the steadily growing pile of beer cans in Ritchie’s laughably small “office”, and the overwhelming sense of mediocrity, then the day’s operations looked just like any other music store.

Jason had switched positions several times throughout the afternoon, starting his shift in the backseat of an unsettlingly tall Ukranian man’s car to deliver some newly-fixed-and-furbished violins, flutes, and oboes to what few local schools worked with the business, then making his way into the workshop with Zak and Theo to offer moral support as they tried their hardest to rewire some unlucky fellow’s busted record player, and then spending a good hour or two on what was colloquially known as “ground duty,” in which the participant would waste their life standing in various sections of the store asking those that came by if they needed help finding anything.

After lunch, he had moved last-minute into the one job he had never worked—the register. 

See, there was no meticulously planned schedule of who would do what and when in that store. There was no color-coded spreadsheet hanging upstairs to remind the employees that it was their turn to unload deliveries, or organize said deliveries, or that Jake Arnolds was coming in at noon for a drum lesson. 

Make no mistake, such a list  _ did  _ exist, drunkenly scrawled on whatever paper Ritchie could find at the end of the day.

But it was well-established by that time that the schedule was incredibly flexible—so long as Ritchie didn’t catch anyone trading places, which he rarely did.

As such, on that particular afternoon, Jason thought nothing of it when he decided to cover for Theo.

The man had claimed that his eleven year-old cat wasn’t doing well, and hell, the Jason had thought, if that was true, then what was thirty minutes answering the phone and thanking people for their purchases?

As it turned out, there was a lot more to it than that.

It hadn’t occurred to the young man that he had never actually touched the register—he always assumed someone else was in charge of it.

But even when the thought did strike him, standing behind that counter, it didn’t phase him.

He never thought to wonder what the reason for his lack of experience was.

But don’t be naive. 

There  _ was _ a reason for it.

And it didn’t take very long for Jason to be made aware of it, his father stumbling out of his broom closet as soon as the young man’s first sale had ended.

“What the hell are you doing there?” Ritchie snapped, tripping over his own feet as he moved towards the register. “What happened to Theo?”

Jason shrugged. “He had to check on his cat. I told him I’d fill in while he did i—”

“No, you’re not. No, no… go get someone else. I don’t want you standin’ there.”

The old man looked around the store, squinting.

But Jason only cocked an eyebrow, crossing his arms and shifting his weight as he watched his father.

Either that man had lost his freaking mind, he thought, or something was up.

“Why can’t I?” he asked. “I’ve watched Zak and Jude enough… I think I know how to work it.”

Ritchie shook his head. “That isn’t what I mean. But Jason, you are  _ not  _ allowed to be standing there.”

The young man rolled his eyes.

“For Christ’s sake, Da, how drunk  _ are  _ you?”

“Oh,” His father tapped his foot, impatient. “Don’t you start that with me. You listen to me, young man, I want you to get over here this instant and find someone else to take your place—you understand?”

His mouth held open in a zombie-like gape, his eyes glued on Ritchie, Jason began to punch numbers into the register.

“Wow,” he deadpanned. “Look at me. I can hit buttons and print receipts and everything. It’s almost like I’m capable of doin’ shit.”

The old man frowned. 

In retrospect, Jason should have known he was setting him off.

Then again, that seemed to be one of his favorite pastimes.

“You think this is funny?” Ritchie asked, running his hand over his beard. “Hm? You gettin’ a good laugh outta this?”

The young man shrugged. “As good as it gets, sir, yes, sir.”

His father raised his voice.

“Jason Starkey,” he cried. “Don’t you play dumb with me! This isn’t some kind of game!”

Just for good measure, the old man slammed his fist on the counter.

“Dad,” Jason sighed. “You’re going to scare off the cu—”

“I’ll tell you what, Jay, you think it’s funny, but there ain’t gonna be  _ nothin _ ’ funny when I look in there and I find all the cash gone—you hear?”

The young man’s head spun around so fast he swore he saw into a new dimension.

“When you  _ what _ ?”

Ritchie shook his head as he walked around the main floor of the building.

  
“Julian?” he called. “Julian… where the hell is Julian….”

Jason just stood there, dumbfounded.

After a moment, realizing that he had to do  _ something _ , the young man vacated the register and ran after his father.

“Hey!” he called. “Hey, you didn’t answer the fucking question!”

“And you didn’t answer mine, either. Now where in God’s name has that kid ran off to? He have a sick cat, too?”

Jason opened his mouth to speak, the smell of cigarette smoke wafting in through the back door.

But his father ignored him, stomping along to the end of the hall, having finally spotted poor Julian.

The young man looked just as confused as Jason, frozen still in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and a frown on his face.

“Julian!” Ritchie called.

The young man flinched. “Um…”

“There you are—I’ve been lookin’ all over for you. Are you busy?”

Jude shook his head. “I just got off my smoke break.”

“So no?”

“No, sir.”

The shopkeeper nodded. “Good. Then you get to the register and make sure Jason don’t go back there.”

Jason stepped in front of his father, desperate to get the old man’s attention.

“Jude’s not doin’ shit,” he hissed. “Until you tell me what the hell is wrong with you. I know how to use it, I—it’s beyond me why you think I’m gonna  _ steal _ …"

Julian raised his eyebrows. “Oh, dear God.”

“Listen,” Jason went on, spitting through his words. “There ain’t no reason I shouldn’t be able to stand there, and until you tell me why  _ you  _ think otherwise, I’m not budging.”

“For God’s sake,” Ritchie said, shaking his head. “You know why.”

“No, I fucking don’t!”

Julian ran a hand through his hair, his skin flushing as he swallowed and diverted his eyes from the scene.

He was clearly conflicted. 

“Jason,” the old man finally sighed, speech just slightly slurring. “I don’t know what kinda world you think I live in, but I’m not so dumb as to put someone known for stealin’ shit to get drug money behind the register of my store.”

The weight of the words was indescribable.

Jason felt like he had just been socked in the jaw, like he was seated flat on his ass with blood dripping from his mouth, breathing heavy as lead with a head as light as feathers.

He wasn’t sure what to think at first. 

There was just… nothing.

He almost couldn’t believe what he had just heard.

Trying to gather his thoughts, he blinked.

It was real, alright.

And if Ritchie was going to stand in that hallway with  _ those  _ kinds of words coming out of his mouth, then he was a goddamn hypocrite.

And by God, Jason thought, he was gonna pay.

The young man’s voice was low as he growled, “Is  _ that _ what you think of me?”

Ritchie didn’t answer.

And so Jason took a step forward.

Jude backed away from the scene, laughing nervously to himself in between rushed, muttered apologies.

“D’ye hear me?” Jason asked. “Huh? Is that what you think of me?”

Finally, Julian tapped out.

Jason wasn’t sure where exactly he went—and to be honest, he didn’t care.

It wasn’t his fight, anyhow.

He was right to leave.

“I’m not playing this game,” Ritchie finally mumbled. “Jason, I’m not gonna have you talkin’ to me like that.”

“And I’m not gonna have you treating me like something I’m not,” the young man shot back. “Now you told me I’m a thief and a liar—is that right?”

His father’s face flushed under scrutiny. 

“I didn’t say  _ anything  _ of that so—”

“You said just a minute ago that you don’t trust me to use the register because you think I’m gonna steal the money for drugs. You remember that, don’t you?”

“Of course I do,” Ritchie grumbled. “And you know what, I said it because that’s the truth. For Christ’s sake, Jay—you can’t just deny that you’ve got a history of doin’ that sort of thing!”

The young man stared his father down like he was the last man on Earth.

In that moment, there wasn’t anyone Jason hated more.

It was like a whole lifetime of frustration had come to the boiling point, like everything the young man had tried to keep pent inside was finally allowed to be released.

Of course, it felt like that a lot; Jason was very prone to emotional outbursts.

But there was something then that was different.

There was a sort of confidence in his accomplishments that had never been there before.

It made him just the slightest bit calmer—maybe not more logical, but more level-headed.

Calmer, however, is a much different thing than calm.

“I’m sorry if you take it as some slight against you,” Ritchie continued. “But you get what you pay for, love. And if you want to go out and steal things—not to mention deny it—”

With all the resolution of a deranged Roman dictator (and the volume of an equally deranged German one) Jason snapped back, “ _ I  _ am not the one denying things here. I’d tell the whole fuckin’ world what I did if I had to, and if the whole fuckin’ world asked me, then I’d tell the truth.”

He shook his head. “But  _ you _ ? Jesus Christ, now you’re some special kind of gobshite, aren’t you?”

“Jason Starkey,” Ritchie warned. “You’re on some  _ very  _ thin ice here.”

“No, no! For Christ’s sake, you’re deranged! You’ve got to be! Just take a look at yourself! Take one look at this place and tell me you’re in good shape when you’re stumblin’ around here telling me I can’t be trusted at the register!

“Does—Holy hell, does it even hit you that  _ you’re  _ the only one stealin’ from this place? That  _ you’re  _ the one hoarding all the money for booze? I’m sure Baba’d get a laugh outta that one, hollerin’ at you every night for it.”

Ritchie raised his voice. “Don’t you drag your father into this! My God, Jason, when you come home, and you walk in that door and face him—”

“He can chew me out all he wants,” Jason retorted. “ _ And then some _ . It doesn’t change the fact that you’re a raging alcoholic draggin’ himself and everyone around him into Hell.

“Maybe you don’t see it now—God, if you ever did see it it’d be over my dead body—but let me tell you this, ‘cause everyone around you can see it just fine:

“It’s—Shit… it’s like you’re in this hole or something, Da.”

The old man’s eyes widened, recognition striking them under the buzz of the fluorescent lights.

“You’re in this hole,” Jason repeated. “And I don’t know if anyone ever told you this—clearly, they haven’t—but for fuck’s sake, if you find yourself in a hole,  _ you have to stop digging _ .”

“You know what?” The young man shook his head, swallowing his shame only to spit it back out at his father. “I-I spent this whole bloody year tryin’ to do better than I did when I got busted. I grew a pair of balls and I owned up to all the shit I’ve done.”

Ritchie squinted, a flash of fear striking his face. “What do you mean?”

His face red as a candy apple, Jason snapped, “I mean I’ve been trying to do better than  _ you _ , you git. I’ve been tryin’ to get clean. I’ve been tryin’ to talk to Dhani more, I’ve been tryin’ to fix the mess that I’ve made—and I know it’s a novelty to you, but dammit, I  _ know  _ I made a mess.”

He sounded ready to split in half or lose his voice as he went on, “Dad, I walked through Hell and back tryin’ to make up for all the… for all the  _ shit  _ I’ve done. And I know that don’t mean nothin’ to you or Baba or anyone else—God knows you don’t give a damn if I’m sittin’ in the living room or dead in a ditch somewhere.”

Ritchie drew back.

“But you know why I did all that?” the young man asked, speaking from the back of his throat in a growl. “You know  _ why  _ I kept it up for so long? It’s ‘cause I ain’t gonna see myself turn into  _ you _ .”

Jason swallowed, if only to keep his mouth from losing all moisture.

The saliva felt like poison dripping down his throat.

“So, yeah,” he hissed. “If you wanna tell me that I can’t stand there and do my fuckin’ job… that I’m the one that’d take money from this place just to get high for a little while, that it’s  _ me  _ that can’t be trusted enough to actually take a stand and make things better… then you need to look in a goddamn mirror.”

“Jason, I—”

“No!” the young man cried, hysterical. “No, don’t you even start. Do you—” he began to raise his voice. “Do you know the  _ difference  _ between you and me?”

He didn’t wait for his father to answer.

“The difference is that I don’t wait ‘till everything’s fallen apart to try and fix it. The  _ difference  _ is that I  _ try to fix it _ , you cunt!”

“Jason,” Ritchie called, harsh and low. “Come on, you ain’t got to shout.”

The words fell on deaf ears.

“You bastard!” the young man cried, both in the sense of wailing out a sound and having tears fall from his cheeks. “You bloody  _ bastard _ —I’ve kept quiet my whole life now, and now you’re tellin’ me to do it again?!”

His father seemed at a loss, slurring as quick as he could, “I’m not tellin’ you to bottle shit up, I’m tellin’ you there are other people in this store, and they’ve got their own—”

Jason shook his head.

He wasn’t sure what kind of funk he was in, but he did know one thing:

Anger was one hell of a drug.

And once he was high on his rage, the young man didn’t want to come down.

“I’m sick and tired of it!” he screeched. “For fuck’s sake, I’m sick of it! I don’t know what in God’s name is wrong with you, walkin’ around like you’re some kinda hotshot when you ain’t nothin’ but a bloody hypocrite! I don’t know what’s wrong with Baba, keepin’ his mouth shut about everything… don’t you  _ get  _ what you’re doing?

“To me,” he said. “To Lee, to Dhani, to everyone under the fucking sun… you’re ruining everything, and you’re too drunk to even notice!”

Ritchie was stunned, his eyes portraying nothing but absolute bewilderedness. “Jason, for the love of—”

“No!” The young man was full-on breaking down now, shouting and screaming so loud in the shop that he was sure everyone could hear him, employee or customer or otherwise. “No—you don’t know half the shit I’ve seen! You don’t know any of the things I’ve had to put myself through! Dad,  _ I  _ had to be the one to explain to Dhani—to a goddamn seven year old kid—that  _ you  _ have a major fucking problem!

“Not you, not Baba, but me! Jesus Christ, you should be glad it wasn’t some kind of social worker, at the rate you’re going!”

“There ain’t no need to shout!” Ritchie said, though his volume wasn’t exactly low.

“Oh, yes there is,” Jason protested. “Listen, I’ve gone up to my limit with all this; I think I’ll shout as much as I freaking please.”

The young man, his head filled with wasps, was unable to hear the footsteps coming down the stairs.

“You’re a hypocrite!” he went on. “You’re a bastard, you’re a liar, you’re a cheat—”

“Easy, now,” Zak interrupted. “Come here, Jay, we’re goin’ out for a little while.”

Jason smacked his brother’s hand as soon as he felt it brush his shoulder.

It was a bit cruel in retrospect—he was well aware of the man’s dislike of sudden, violent movements—but in that moment, Jason couldn’t have cared less.

He was angry.

He was shaking.

And for the first time in his life, he was free.

That was all he cared about.

“Jason,” Zak repeated, always the mediator. “You need to get outside for a bit.”

His brother ignored him, still staring their father down as he added, “You’re a  _ drunk _ , you hear me?”

His grasp more firm this time, Zak grabbed hold of Jason’s arm and began to lead him away from the scene.

“You ain’t nothin’ but a deadbeat drunk! And for God’s sake, I ought to have stayed with my  _ mum  _ over you!”

Even as his brother dragged him across the store, even as the bell above the door chimed and he felt the wind brush up against his face, Jason continued to shout.

Though once he was outside, he found himself to be just slightly quieter, his voice cracking as he concluded, “You’re a shit dad!”

“Jason.”

“You’re an arse!”

“ _ Jason _ .”

“You’re—”

“Jason,” Zak finally snapped, rearing his brother’s shoulders so that the two made eye contact. “What the hell’s gotten into you? What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’ll tell you what I’m doin’,” the young man said, acting like a mad dog off its leash. “I’m givin’ that fucker a piece o’ my goddamn mind!”

“Alright, well y—”

“I’m tired of it, Zak! I’m tired of it! Listen, I said I shoulda stayed with my mum if I knew I was gonna be raised by  _ him _ , and I mean it!”

“I know,” Zak reassured. “I know and I get that—but you’ve gotta calm down, kid, alright?”

Jason shook his head. 

“I ain’t the one that’s gotta calm down.”

“Yes,” the older man sighed. “You are, love. You look like you’re having some kind of psychotic allergic reaction.”

The younger man couldn’t deny that, he supposed.

But it didn’t make him any less angry.

“Do you want to sit down?” Zak asked. “We can go in my car or something… or you could just plant yourself on the curb…”

Jason shook his head. “It’s alright.”

“It’s raining.”

“Doesn’t matter to me. I’m hot as tits.”

The older man raised an eyebrow. “If you say so…”

“I hate him,” Jason went on. “I mean it—I hate the git with every bone in my body.”

“Hate’s quite a strong word…”

“Well, you know what? It’s one he deserves. I could use some more  _ choice  _ language, of course, if you’d prefer—I think that’d be more fitting, actually.”

“Yeah,” Zak sighed. “Don’t worry about that… I think all of Europe head you call him a bastard.”

“And a gobshite.”

“And a deadbeat.”

“And an arse who can’t keep his head on his shoulders,” Jason mumbled. “I know you’ll disagree, but that much is just a fact.”

“If it’s such a fact,” the old man proposed. “Then what makes someone an arse and not an idiot?”

Jason’s face soured. “Oh, piss off.”

Zak shook his head. “I’m sorry.”

For a while afterwards, it seemed as though the conversation had died.

There was a part of the young man that knew it was his fault; as often as Zak was delegated to be the mediator of the family (especially when it came to matters involving his brother) it was no secret that such high-pressure, high-emotion situations were not his strong suit.

Zak was a very anxious man, at the end of the day. More so than he appeared.

And though he tried his best to hide it, Jason was well aware that his brother couldn’t help but compare the dysfunction in his real family in Liverpool to the dysfunction in his birth family in Wales.

“Should…” Zak began. “Do you want me just to leave you here for a while? Maybe let off some steam?”

Jason shook his head, crossing his arms if only to give them something to do. “Do what you want. It don’t matter to me.”

“In that case,” the older man sighed. “If you’re so sure about it, you can just take these.”

He handed his brother the keys to his car. 

“I’m not sayin’ you can drive it out to Manchester or nothin’,” Zak explained. “But it might be nice just to hang out, get yourself warmed up, and take a little drive somewhere, yeah?”

Jason didn’t answer.

“You just come back when you’re ready. In the meantime… I’ll take care of things.”

After a moment, the young man sighed. “Yeah. You do that.”

Zak nodded. “I will. Now go ahead and don’t wear the battery out, alright?”

“Will do.”

With that, the older man left, and the younger man made his way—slowly, but surely—into his brother’s car.

He didn’t turn the heat on at first; he wanted to believe he could tough it out. But after a while, the cold became unbearable, and Jason had no other choice.

He was sure to heed Zak’s advice, though. He knew that if he drained the car’s battery that afternoon, then he would have to pay for it in nights babysitting Tatia later on.

So for all his time spent in the car—about three hours, or in other words, the remainder of the work day—Jason switched between turning the heat off periodically to save energy, and then turning it back on to save himself from freezing to death.

God, he thought. If the best Zak could do was tell him to come back when he was ready, then the man might as well have given him permission to run away.

He was at a point by then, though he wasn’t sure why, where he could no longer take even the sight of Ritchie.

There was something about the old man that had turned him into the bane of Jason’s entire existence. Just the thought of him sent the young man into a rage.

Now, as fate would have it, this was the exact point that Jason heard a tapping at the window.

Turning around, a bit startled, he was not amused to find his father standing outside with the wind blowing his hair in twenty separate directions.

His hands on the wheel, he shook his head.

“Jason?” Ritchie called, his voice muffled from behind the glass. “Jay, I think we ought to—”

Jason slammed his finger on the button to roll the window down.

“I think if I had any goddamn sense,” he raged, speaking at a mile a minute. “Then I would run you over with this thing. And I think if  _ you  _ had any—though, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here—then you would back the fuck off.”

At first, Ritchie’s face contorted. His eyebrows knit together, his eyes squinted just slightly, and for a brief second, his mouth hung open, like maybe,  _ just maybe _ , he would try tempting the young man’s threat.

But he never did.

After a moment, the old man pursed his lips, cast his eyes towards the ground, and in a cardboard-dull type of voice, he simply murmured, “Alrighty then…” and walked back into the shop.

In the end, Jason supposed he had been right in saying what he had—not just while he had been in the building, but in the car, and the car lot as well.

He had certainly meant all of it.

And harsh as his delivery may have been, in his own head, it was justified.

Jason was beyond the point of asking politely for his family to—quite literally—sober up and stop making excuses for themselves. He was beyond the point of keeping his head low and cursing them in private. 

They ought to have heard all of that, he thought.

Maybe it wouldn’t make them do anything (he knew damn well that nothing ever would) but at least he had gotten his message across.

By the time Zak returned to the car and the shop was closing, Jason had fully convinced himself that his hands were clean.

There wasn’t anything in that conversation, or for that matter, in his home life, that the young man was at fault for. 

He was perfectly justified in his responses and reactions to the unforgivably stupid and downright unfortunate actions of his fathers.

But they, on the other hand, had a whole lot to own up for.

Even so, Jason couldn’t help but feel a wave of dread wash over him when the first thing Zak said after opening the car door was:

“Hey, Dad just wanted me to let you know… he wants to drive you home.”

Jason didn’t even bother to look at the man. “Tell him I’ve had an aneurysm and fucking died.”

“He’s real insistent, Jay.”

“He’s also real drunk.”

The older man rubbed his hand against his neck. “Well… that’s what he wanted me to say. You can do whatever you’d please; I’d be happy to drive you home if—”

“Oh,” Jason groaned. “For fuck’s sake, I’ll just go.”

“You sure?”

The slamming of the car door on his way out gave all the answers Zak needed.

Now, ironically enough, Jason had to wait some more in his father’s car. The old man was doing his once-arounds and twice-arounds on each of the shop’s floors, organizing everything (or trying his best) into profits and expenses and money to spend on cheap wine.

But when Ritchie finally did come into the car—on the passenger side, because there was no way Jason would ever let him touch the wheel—he seemed different in some way.

He had that same stony look on his face that he had had walking back into the building.

As Jason pulled out of the car lot, he heard the old man sigh.

There was a deep frown on his face, like for the first time in his life, he was thinking about something.

And he stayed like that for nearly the entire ride.

It wasn’t until the two were about four blocks away from their house that Ritchie opened his mouth and began, “Jason, I—”

“Save it,” the young man snapped. “Just save it—just shut your arse. I’m sick of hearin’ you talk. I’m sick of  _ you _ .”

His father pursed his lips.

And that was the end of that—at least from what Jason could see.   



	10. From the Office of the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, Mr. Boris Johnson Cordially Declares: The End of the World

The end of the world, as it would turn out, didn’t come with a bang or a crash or anything cool; it was nothing like Jason had expected it to be.

The end of the world came with grocery receipts longer than what humanity had once thought possible, with the buzzing of the television, with the unmistakable sound of Boris Johnson trying to keep himself together in a nationally broadcast address, and most importantly, with the slowly overwhelming sense of forthcoming doom in the Starkey household.

The end of the world—or so it seemed—came on the twenty-third of March, 2020.

Now, the funny thing about the apocalypse (the bit that all of those science fiction novels had gotten wrong) was that everyone knew it was coming. It wasn’t the type of  _ meteor hits, everyone dies  _ scenario that Jason, or Ritchie, or anyone else had made it out to be. It was, instead, a series of gradual changes—not severe enough to impact daily life at first, but severe enough to spread rumors and whispers, which would eventually grow large enough to become the standing reality.

First to shut down were sports.

Then came the schools.

And then, in the span of just a couple of days, who else but Boris Freaking Johnson was once again plastered over the Starkeys’ television announcing that every non-essential pub, gym, store, and shop in the U.K. was, as of the very next day, expected to close indefinitely to prevent the spread of 2020’s international darling—the novel coronavirus.

For the first time in ages, the family all sat together on the sofa.

No one spoke.

But everyone had the same thing on their minds (though the same torrent of things was more like it).

The shop. 

That one was obvious.

As much as Ritchie could drunkenly argue otherwise, Starkey Music and Records was by no means an  _ essential establishment _ .

It was a shithole store, Jason thought, and by God, it was bleeding money already. To cut its head from its body—to take away every one of its customers indefinitely was, in a cosmic sense, just flat out cruel.

The business was damned to fail without its revenue. 

It was doomed to.

And that was what kicked off the worst part of it for Jason.

With the shop closed, and with money lost by the day, only adding to the skyrocketing debt that, much to Ritchie’s surprise, one inevitably acquires by such fierce and constant pursuit of alcohol, the old man wouldn’t know what to do with himself.

So he would turn to the one thing he always did.

He would drink.

He would drink and Jason would relapse and Lee would shut down and George would lose his mind and Dhani would be left behind in the dust of it all—

Jason’s mind seemed to be spiralling out of control; it moved sporadically from one thought to another without any intent of slowing down or stopping.

If his father kept on drinking the way he did, and he was forced to stay at home all day, then the house would turn into a living powder keg.

It would be a twisted symphony—hell, a  _ cacophony  _ of bickering, slurring, and plate-breaking.

And trying to make sense of the world in a place like that was enough to break a person.

Something would go wrong, Jason thought.

Dear God, something was going to go  _ horribly  _ wrong.

Maybe some people saw it as a challenge, as some kind of opportunity to pick up new hobbies and enjoy working from home.

Maybe they thought it would be nice just to spend some more time with their families—with their husbands and wives and sons and daughters and dogs and cats and the like.

But there was something so different about that prospect, something so downright terrifying for Jason.

It was just him, sitting pale-faced on a sofa with people he hardly even knew, unable to speak to them, and without any clue of how to mend his breaking (or maybe already broken) family.

And it would be like that, he realized, for quite some time.

The only thing was:

It wouldn’t work like that for long.

Someone would snap, he thought.

Someone would snap, and just like it was doing that evening, the whole world would turn upside down again. 

Jason held his breath as he turned to gauge the reactions of those strangers he liked to pretend were his family.

In that moment, he seemed to be the only one tearing his eyes from the screen.

Lee sat apart from the group in the chair by the window, her legs crossed one over the other.

Her face was blank. Her eyes were glassy.

To even  _ begin  _ to untangle her thoughts would require much more work than her brother was willing to put into his analysis.

And so he moved on to Dhani.

Out of everyone in the house, it was the boy that seemed the most confused. 

That made sense, of course; he was only a boy. 

What should he have known of pandemics or plagues or the World Health Organisation? 

It was all alphabet soup to him.

Someone would have to explain it to him later.

Jason set his sights on Ritchie, and just looking at him, he felt sick.

The man already had a beer in his hand. 

The decay of the family’s collective corpse was beginning. 

That was the truth.

But it was only one of two.

The second?

There were no angels—not in Heaven or Berlin or anywhere—that could help the family.

They had only themselves, the walls around them, and all the time in the world.

Jason shook his head as he stood up, mumbling curses on his way out the door.

  
Still, there was one person he hadn’t taken a glance at.

George covered his mouth with his hand, Jason’s seat on his left still warm.

If ever he could choose when the gods took him out of his current life and into the next, then it was fair to say and plain to see that it would have been right about then.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, folks, thanks for sticking it out. All 150 of you... it's kind of amazing to think that that many people care to at least click on some of the more obscure fics in this fandom. The third part of the series will start shortly, once I've practiced writing for the third narrator... in the meantime, you can wonder who it is--though I'm sure it's not very hard to figure out...


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